Every game movie is a heist about memory

Nobody makes a game movie because the plot is good. The plots are not good. They are a series of rooms with a boss at the end of them. Game movies get made because an enormous number of people have a very specific feeling attached to those rooms, and somebody in a meeting has correctly identified that as a resource.

Not the story. The story is the excuse. What is being adapted is the memory of a particular afternoon. A specific age, a specific television, a specific hour when you were allowed to be doing this instead of something else.

That is what the trailer is selling when it plays the four notes from the theme. Not narrative. Recall.

Because a memory is not transferable. You can put the theme in, and the character on the poster, and the level in act two, and everybody who has that memory will feel something. Everybody else in the theater will see a competent film about a plumber.

So the movie ends up with its floor and its ceiling in the same place. It cannot fail completely, because the people with the memory will turn up. It cannot really succeed either, because nothing in it was built for anybody else.

The exceptions all do the same thing. They stop trying to hand you the memory and go build a new one out of the same parts.

Which is a much harder pitch. "We will make you feel what you felt in 1998" gets a budget. "We will make something you have no feelings about yet" does not.

But it is the only version that works on somebody who was not there. And somebody who was not there is most of the audience, and always will be.