On April 20, Rampage will roar into theaters - a movie adaptation of the popular '80s Bally Midway arcade classic. Of course, anyone familiar with the video game industry is well aware movie adaptations don't have the best track record. It's known as the "video game curse," but apparently Rampage director Brad Peyton was unfamiliar with it during filming.
"There’s obviously a pressure to deliver on these things and to ground the movie and to deliver on spectacle and all that, but there also aren’t these expectations to what this character’s supposed to be or what this plot is supposed to be. I didn’t know about this quote-unquote 'video game curse' until about two weeks after I finished the movie," Peyton told IGN. "A lot of times, [studios] attempt to adapt games that have massive followings. ... When you attempt to adapt something that has an incredibly deep plotline or character or something along those lines, you’re beholden to delivering something. And it’s really a difficult challenge because as a gamer, I know, I play as the hero. That’s an immersive medium, and so, it’s really hard to go up against something that pre-exists."
As a game, Rampage didn't exactly have the most in-depth plot, as players assumed the role of a gigantic monster - a Gorilla, Werewolf, or Lizard-like creature - and traveled around the world destroying cities. Peyton's adaptation features a little more story as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's character David Okoye is a primatologist who develops a close relationship with the silverback gorilla George and attempts to diffuse the situation unfolding.
"The things that you really take away from a brand, in this sense, is not necessarily a story, because you can go play it, but you take away a tone, and a theme, and, you know, that’s what I look at," Peyton added. "What’s the tone, what’s the theme, what can I do here that’s new, that’s not repetitious to what already exists?"
"My ultimate goal of this movie was to genuinely remind you, monsters are scary, but monster movies are meant to be fun," said Peyton. "With these movies, the challenge is to constantly be unpredictable, and to constantly entertain. And I think the most entertaining stuff is the stuff that, you just cannot see what’s going to come next. So when Dwayne’s like, of course the wolf flies, that’s just a little sprinkling of where these creatures can go and what they can do. We really drilled down on the science."
Rampage opens in theaters on April 20.