MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
Once there was a time that news of video game adaptations would strike fear into the hearts of fans everywhere, with many movies based on popular characters frequently falling short of the mark, but recently there has been a surge in big budget video game movies that have managed to, on the whole, please both fans and newcomers to the franchises. Already in production are TV series based on The Last of Us at HBO, and Halo at Paramount+, as well as the animated Super Mario Bros. movie, Sonic The Hedgehog sequel and a rumored Donkey Kong animated movie among others. It seems that video game adaptations are becoming just as popular as reboots and remakes.
The original Mass Effect game was developed by BioWare and published through Microsoft Game Studios in 2007, and was released exclusively on the Xbox 360. The game transported players to 2183 and focussed on Commander Shepard, a soldier on a mission to defeat the Reapers, a race of sentient starships, and stop their planned invasion. When EA took over the publishing of the game, it moved to make its debut on Playstation 3 and PC, and subsequently saw the release of sequels in 2010, 2012 and 2017. In 2020, BioWare and EA announced that a fifth game in series was being developed.
The Mass Effect franchise has gained a lot of praise for the strong narrative and worldbuilding involved in its games, and that should mean an easy translation to a small-screen long-form piece of storytelling, and it will be the latest branching of the franchise, which has already seen tie-in novels and comic-books released. In 2012, an animated film was produced, entitled Mass Effect: Paragon Lost, and even earlier than that in 2010 Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures acquired the rights to bring the game to the big screen but the planned adaptation didn’t make it past the development stage.
