Adventure game royalty Broken Sword is the latest videogame to get a movie adaptation, with a film being co-developed by series creators Revolution Software and producer Story Kitchen, which has worked on numerous videogame adaptations for screen, including the (generally liked) Sonic the Hedgehog films and Amazon’s upcoming Life is Strange TV show.
Reported by Variety, details about the film are currently thin on the ground, but we do know that the script is being penned by Evan Spiliotopolos, whose writing credits include the live action Beauty and the Beast adaptation, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, and The Pope’s Exorcist. I have not seen any of those films, so I can’t tell you how good the scripts were. But the RottenTomatoes scores aren’t exactly spectacular, with Beauty and the Beast ranking highest at 71%.
Alongside this one specific detail is a lot of vague assertions about remaining faithful to the series. “Very few franchises of this era have stayed relevant, premium and loyal to the intelligence of their audience. Broken Sword has done all three,” said Story Kitchen founders Dmitri M. Johnson and Michael Lawrence in a statement. “Our work isn’t to adapt a game into a film. It’s to move a world that has been building for three decades into the next medium it deserves, working hand-in-hand with the people who built it.” I don’t know what it means for a franchise to stay premium, but the part about respecting the audience’s intelligence is fair.
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Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil, meanwhile, said that Story Kitchen approached him with a “deep passion for the IP” and that “the creative conversations have been about translating what Broken Sword is rather than what it can be made to look like.”
It’s an interesting one. On the one hand, Broken Sword seems like a natural fit for a film adaptation, given how it borrows from the adventure serial heritage in a similar manner to Indiana Jones. On the other hand, Hollywood has very recently proved it can absolutely biff it in adapting this type of story, with the dreadful Uncharted movie miraculously spinning gold into shit.
Either way, there’s a decent chance of this actually happening, given how Hollywood has eyes for videogames at the moment. Both A Minecraft Movie and the two Mario flicks were massive box office hits despite their varying quality (A Minecraft Movie was alright, actually, certainly more interesting than either of the Mario films). I don’t see Broken Sword breaking a billion dollars, personally, but it definitely has a better chance of being a decent film.
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