Should we even be trying to turn video games into movies?

Maybe there's a reason these adaptations aren't working

It’s Tuesday, March 1st, and here’s where we are…

It’s been a few. There have been reasons, most of which I can’t share at the moment.

That’s a good thing. Being busy is good, especially right now when it feels so chaotic in the world, and it does. It really does. I try not to let it color my work, but I definitely have been feeling more anxiety than normal over the last month, and a lot of it is because of external forces completely out of my control. My just-about-to-be-17-year-old son is going to Europe this summer on a school trip that’s been planned for two years, and it freaks me out. I want him to go. I want him to have this experience. I want him to enjoy it. But the timing is horrible, and the world is on fire, and sending him to Europe in June feels insane and precarious when there is a literal war being fought in Ukraine right now. It feels trivial to be writing a newsletter about movies and TV shows and video games at a time like this.

Hell, it feels trivial to be watching movies or TV shows on a week like this, but that’s a weird side-effect of the media age. I know that my actions aren’t going to have any impact on the situation in Ukraine, but if you look at social media, people are so earnest about all of the energy they’re expending talking about it. People have this energy they have to put somewhere every day, and a lot of that is about making sure they’re not “left out.” It’s one of the reasons COVID took over everything for that first year and now we’ve had several years of media outlets trying to figure out what they’re obligated to do, how they’re obligated to do it, and what, if anything, the new normal looks like. One of the things that have happened because of the demolition of people’s faith in traditional news outlets is that everything is news now. People get their news from the weirdest fucking places. TikTok is news. YouTube is news. People see the news while they’re pumping gas. They can find any flavor of news they want using their phones, their computers, or their televisions. They can find news that reinforces their beliefs. They can find news that contradicts their beliefs. They can find news that is desperate to shape their beliefs. Because there is so much information all the time, people feel obligated to pipe in, to be part of every single conversation, even when all of the information they’re sharing is 100% grade-a bullshit, and it is exhausting to witness.

I am not an expert on… well, most things, frankly. I can talk about what I talk about, and if it feels too trivial right now, please just archive these until the world eases up a bit. But if these serve as an antidote to all of that for you, then maybe that’s the value. Maybe that’s not as trivial as it feels at first. Just know that while it feels like everyone’s suddenly an expert on everything all of the time, I am not, and I am going to try to keep my focus on the things I understand. Anything else from me would just be noise, and we’ve got plenty of that these days. Even within our industry, I find myself baffled by the choices many people are making these days. For example, the animation nerd in me is thrilled to hear that Skydance stepped up to finally make Brad Bird’s longtime dream project Ray Gunn, a film noir science-fiction movie he’s been trying to make at least as long as I’ve lived in Los Angeles… so since 1990 or so?

image courtesy of Warner Bros

The reason he’s making it at Skydance, though, is because that’s where John Lasseter works, and I really don’t feel good about John Lasseter running an animation studio. He did that. There are reasons he stopped doing that. Failing sideways is a Hollywood tradition, I understand, but at some point, we need to wrap it up on this whole “great men” bullshit narrative and when someone abuses their position of power, we should be willing to say that’s enough of that. I understand that John Lasseter made a lot of people a lot of money, but that should not be his get out of jail free card.