The slow death of movie tie-ins, their move to mobile and the gamification of cinema

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...13/10/Thor.jpgIf you have a passing interest in blockbuster cinema and/or comic-books (or perhaps just beards) then there’s a strong chance you’ll be seeing Thor 2: The Dark World over the coming fortnight. You won’t, however, be able to hammer-throw your way down the bustling high-street to drop hard-earned cash on a movie tie-in videogame. And that is a very good thing.The death of the movie tie-in has been a slow burn that’s seen a mostly abhorrent trickle of blink-and-miss boxed titles muddying the names of everything from Marvel’s Iron Man to JJ Abrams’ Star Trek over the past ten years, each with seemingly diminished returns and lower Metacritic rankings than the last. It’s not difficult to figure out why such titles don’t make the grade: they’re part of a marketing plan rather than a more wholesome creative vision, designed to coincide with the tidal wave of excitement for a given franchise rather than succeed on their own merits. I can only imagine the lofty ideas that are cruelly abandoned, the pre-production time (if there is any) that is soon sucked into crunch time.It became clear as far back as Super Star Wars that the less synchronous a movie or comic-related game is with any big budget film release in cinemas, the better the chance the game will turn out at least memorable (Konami’s punchy 90s Batman Returns take on Streets Of Rage and Rebellion’s first Aliens Versus Predator come to mind) if not immortal (Rare’s GoldenEye 007 and Starbreeze’s Butcher Bay might flesh out this category) and preferably not landfill (Atari’s ET).

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