I honestly cannot think of an example of a movie adapted from a video game that hasn’t completely sucked. I find myself too often lulled into some stupid and unjustified belief that because I liked a game, I would therefore like a movie version of it, but always somewhere along the way, the movie makers don’t “get” it, or for some reason it just doesn’t work as a movie.

Certainly with modern games, there really is less and less of a reason for the movies to be so damn awful. Games often have characters with personality and a narrative structure. More often than not however a games concept is usually little more than a rip off of a concept you’ve seen before, (often originally as a movie) such that a movie version of the game brings nothing new to the table and ends up seeming quite derivative.

Prince of Persia has a fresh enough concept to it (albeit not entirely original), and more importantly it has a significant amount of money behind it. This buys a good director, big name actors, but doesn’t guarantee quality by any means. Will be interested to see how it goes.

Jerry Bruckheimer, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Mike Newell – this movie has hope.