'Warcraft's Director Desperately Wants To Make A 'Full Throttle' Movie
Video game movies are extremely hard to make, and if you want evidence of that, we dare you to try to watch one. At some point, Hollywood is gonna have to come to terms with the fact that most games simply shouldn't be turned into movies, lest you unleash the cinematic equivalent of a war crime. There are games with actual movie potential out there -- it's just that the studios would rather play it safe and see if maybe the eighth time will be the charm for Resident Evil. A good example is Full Throttle, which is home to one of the most kickass intro sequences to come out of the '90s:
(Save you a trip to Bing.com: Yes, that is Mark Hamill's voice there.)
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And, as it happens, there's a talented director who is obsessed with the idea of bringing this futuristic tale of badass bikers and betrayal into the big screen ... or into a streaming service, at least. We're talking about Duncan Jones, the man who made Moon, Source Code, Mute, and Warcraft, which is still the top-grossing video game movie in the world (although we're confident that it's not too late for Werewolves Within to gather the extra $438,076,496 it needs to surpass it). In fact, while most of us were trying to get into bread-making and nearly burning down our buildings during lockdown, Jones went and wrote a 94-page Full Throttle fan script and put it up online:
The idea of a Jones-directed Full Throttle movie should be an exciting prospect even for those who hated (or just didn't care about) Warcraft, a lovingly-made film based on those text screens most of us skipped without reading in the Warcraft games. About 95% of the dialogue in the original Warcraft is just "Yes, my lord," "(grunt)," and "(death grunt)." Zero people bought those games for the story. Full Throttle, on the other hand, sucked you in with its cinematic style and tricked over a million people into playing a freaking point-and-click adventure game, a genre previously limited to hopeless nerds/future comedy writers. This game had some of the most epic action sequences ever to grace a 14" CRT monitor:
In his script, Jones made some adjustments to the story so that the protagonist doesn't have to spend hours picking at every object on the screen to solve a puzzle, but the rest was already there: the (often hilarious) dialogue, the characters, and the overall plot are pretty much straight from the game. When Jones posted the script, it immediately got an enthusiastic response from Tim Schafer, the man who co-wrote and designed the game ... but, unfortunately, not the one who owns the rights. Disney does, hence Jones' recent request that people please go bug them about letting him make the movie:
Or show! That might actually work better with Jones' script, which sticks to the game's episodic structure. Sure, certain parts could be trimmed to make the story conform to a more traditional three-act structure, but is it really Full Throttle if we don't see the protagonist methodically throw mechanical bunnies into a minefield to explode each and all of the mines? Those are the details that reveal Jones' true passion for this project. He is, after all, a legit old school computer geek -- hell, he even managed to get his old dad all excited about the internet when everyone else thought it was a passing fad.
Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com.
Top image: Lucasfilm