The Sandbox: When Games Become Movie Sequels

How franchises continue in the video game world after the movies stop.

Profit aside, though, how vital is this assimilative relationship between franchise films and games? 2007′s “John Woo Presents: Stranglehold” reunited the Hong Kong action auteur with star Chow Yun-Fat for an entertaining video game sequel to his superlative 1992 classic “Hard Boiled.” The game’s replete with Woo’s signature flying doves and acrobatic mass gunfights, but the narrative never references the film, and won’t, if rumors are to believed, have any bearing on a future film version of “Stranglehold.”

Ditto, one can assume, for the upcoming game tied to August’s “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” which takes place shortly after the events of the film. While director Stephen Sommers probably had some input on this game sequel, it’s hard to imagine its storyline having any bearing on prospective big-screen follow-ups, which would be shaped by more pressing (budgetary; story-wise) concerns. And though “Ghostbusters: The Game” has sparked enough interest to revive talk of a third live-action “Ghostbusters” movie, the filmmakers likely won’t feel obligated to make concessions to a game plot that — no matter how popular it is — will reach only a fraction of the franchise’s devotees.

For the games as well as the films, it may be better that way. “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” and its sequel, both expansive RPGs set thousands of years before Luke Skywalker’s birth, don’t “count” as official “Star Wars” tales. Not beholden to “How does this fit into the big picture?” concerns, they were free to take more chances that, in turn, allowed them to naturally tap into the series’ defining elements (the operatic scope, the epic themes, the planet-traveling exploration).

Those circumstances hold just as true when said sequels have no rational right to exist in the first place. “Scarface: The World is Yours” offers giddy, violent “Grand Theft Auto”-style mayhem by having you play as drug kingpin Tony Montana, even though he suffered one of cinema’s most iconic deaths in Brian De Palma’s epic. The three most recent “Evil Dead” games, despite failing to live up to Sam Raimi’s horror-comedy gems, boast a kindred anything-goes audacity. And while “The Thing” begins immediately after the events of John Carpenter’s film, whose pitch-perfect ending made a follow-up unnecessary, it so accurately captures its ancestor’s spirit that such gripes are made irrelevant. Which suggests, ultimately, that continuity is great but, fanboy outcries to the contrary, not nearly as important as engaging storytelling and gameplay.

The Sandbox, a column about the intersection where film and gaming meet, runs biweekly.

[Additional photo: "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed," LucasArts, 2008]

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