With Netflix's "Castlevania" recording a strong 85% fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes, fans are now also excited to see how the streaming giant is going to handle their next adaptation projects such the novel series-turned video game "The Witcher," which will be turned into a live-action series, and an anime adaptation of Ubisoft's "Assassin's Creed."
The positive response from fans show's how much they trust the company for making television versions of video games after getting disappointed time and again by previous film adaptations of such on the big screen.
Hollywood has not really been very successful when it comes to big screen adaptations of popular video games. While film companies may have the best intentions in making characters such as Super Mario and Lara Croft come to life, almost every video game movie ever made produced the same result: disappointed fans leaving the theaters.
The "Warcraft" movie, for example, disappointed many gamers, even if the box office numbers said otherwise. The fans, mostly gamers, criticized the movie from the actors, to the pacing of the story, to the special effects. Forbes even called the movie "A crushing disappointment in every way."
The hurdle that many producers face in creating a movie adaptation is that gamers who hope to see their favorite games on screen do not just want certain elements of whatever they played to be replicated in a movie. They want to know more about that game's world — and the characters in it.
This is why "Castlevania" was so successful. Gamers were able to know more about the places that surround the castle and the kind of people in it, as the game always confined the players inside the walls of Dracula's castle.
Gamers were even able to know what the characters are like outside of the game. Like how Dracula tried to live like a normal person before he became consumed with hatred for humanity. Meanwhile, fans of Trevor Belmont finally got to know what the hero is like when he is not whipping vampires into ashes. Unfortunately, it turns out he is a drunken knave whenever he is off duty.
Netflix has somehow discovered the formula to making video game adaptations work, and they are hoping that this formula will allow them to produce more quality series that would raise the bar for the future.
