Prime Video Deserves Credit For Finally Pulling Off A Video Game Show 20 Years In The Making
Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.
In many ways, TV has gotten a lot worse in the age of streaming. The seasons are getting shorter, the gaps between them are getting longer, and every show with the slightest whiff of success gets driven into the ground, dragging on endlessly like Stranger Things and getting spun off into a larger universe like The Boys or Reacher or the WandaVision trilogy.
But there are a few upsides to streaming, too. There are some broader advantages, like the availability of any given episode of any given show at the touch of a button (back in the days of regularly scheduled programming, on-demand viewing was a godsend), as well as some more obscure perks, like big-screen stars appearing in small-screen projects — in olden-days Hollywood, doing TV was a big no-no for movie stars, but now, we’ve got Meryl Streep in Big Little Lies — and an unexpected uptick in satisfactory video game adaptations.
For some reason, the rise of streaming has coincided with the video game adaptation curse getting broken. After decades of miserable movie adaptations of Doom and Tomb Raider and Super Mario Bros., live-action TV shows based on video games suddenly became the hottest trend in Hollywood. That trend has yielded some duds, like a Halo show that felt like it was written by someone who saw the cover art of Halo and made a rough guess of what the game inside might be, but there were more than a few masterpieces.
When Netflix turned League of Legends into the epic dystopian tragedy of Arcane, and HBO turned The Last of Us games into a prestige drama, the curse was officially lifted. Prime Video has been at the forefront of this streaming-era salvation of gaming I.P. Not only has Prime adapted the Fallout games into a hit post-apocalyptic action series; it’s also adapted the gaming industry as a whole into the ambitious crossover anthology Secret Level.
Next up, Amazon is turning the Norse-era God of War games into a big-budget streaming series. Hollywood has been trying to adapt God of War into live-action for two decades, and it’s finally happening.
Whether It's Good Or Not, We're Finally Getting A Live-Action God Of War Adaptation
Prime Video has already ordered two seasons of God of War, and they’re both being filmed back-to-back. It was already one of the most ambitious undertakings in recent TV history, and an on-set injury cast doubt on the whole endeavor in late June. Sons of Anarchy’s Ryan Hurst had been cast to play the lead role of Kratos, and had completed a few months of shooting when he injured his bicep.
Amazon looked at the financial pros and cons, weighed the cost of shutting down production to wait for Hurst to recover against the cost of recasting the lead role and reshooting everything Hurst had done up to that point, and ultimately went the latter route. Now, Kratos will be played by Dave Bautista, and all respect to Hurst — he’s a fine actor, and what happened with this job must’ve been devastating — but the prospect of Drax the Destroyer playing our beloved, brooding Kratos has made this show a whole lot more enticing.
We don’t know whether Amazon’s God of War show will be good or not. The decision to skip the Greek-era games and go straight to the Norse-era games might erase some crucial context from Kratos’ journey, but Bautista is a fantastic actor — as is his young co-star, Callum Vinson, who’s been cast as Kratos’ son Atreus. But either way, it’s just impressive that Amazon has pulled this thing off, given the behind-the-scenes turmoil it had to weather.
A movie adaptation of God of War was first announced in 2005. David Self wrote a draft, then Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan wrote another one in 2012, and by the time the 2018 game reinvented the franchise, a film adaptation of the original game was still no closer to becoming a reality. Thanks to Prime Video’s push into the gaming space, we’re finally getting a big-budget live-action adaptation of the God of War games.
God of War
Cast
-
Kratos
-
Callum Vinson
Atreus
-
Max Parker
Heimdall
-
Mandy Patinkin
Odin
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.