Movies based on video games haven’t had the best track record, lest we forget the Street Fighter disaster of 1994. But that may be changing.
The recent Chris Pratt Insults Italian-Americans (aka The Super Mario Bros. Movie) made over a billion dollars at the global box office. And the HBO series The Last of Us, proved that video games could inspire critically-acclaimed dramatic works that in no way involve talking hedgehogs or raiding tombs.
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So it’s no surprise that there are more video game movies coming down the pike. There’s a Legend of Zelda project in the works, and before that, we’ll be getting the vomitous CGI onslaught known as Minecraft. At least Jason Momoa’s stylist seemed to be having fun.
Now this trend is going to even stranger places, as evidenced by the announcement that Apple is developing a movie based on The Oregon Trail.
For those of you born well after the floppy disc era, The Oregon Trail is a video game series that began way back in 1971 with the text-based strategy game. This paved the way for the early educational computer games, which taught a generation of kids all about just how dogshit pioneer life really was.
The game is mostly famous for how many bleak deaths gamers suffered as they attempted to traverse the treacherous landscape of 8-bit 19th century America. Weirdly, the movie adaptation is being described as an “action-comedy,” despite the fact that The Oregon Trail is arguably one of the slowest, least funny titles in the history of gaming. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Oregon Trail movie will also “feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie.”
Good luck finding a word that rhymes with “dysentery.”
Reportedly, Will Speck and Josh Gordon, the team behind Blades of Glory and Office Christmas Party, are helming the project, with “EGOT winners” Benj Pasek and Justin Paul lined up to compose original music. As Gordon told Collider, the game’s unrelenting gloom was the very reason why he wanted to make it a comedy. “It always had this dark band of humor running through it, because your chances of dying from everything from dysentery to a cut to anything was… Basically, every move you ended up dying,” Gordon explained.
“For us, that’s returning a little bit to our roots in comedy,” Gordon continued, ”marrying it with the fun of doing a big musical, and also just the ambition of taking that very seriously as well and making a big historical westward expansion epic that’s also about dying from dysentery.”
He also described how the rights to the game belong to a publishing company, which required them to partner with the “protective” IP owners. Which begs the question: Why not just make a movie about the Oregon Trail that’s not based on the video game? Last time we checked, American history and fatal gastroenteritis were both in the public domain.
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