Working Title 6.26.08: Working Title Casting Call

Posted by Jordan Williams on 06.26.2008

With all of the video games being turned into feature films on the horizon one can't help but to ask "Who should play who?" Well today I hope to solve that problem or at the very least make it worse. Also, who will FINALLY be crowned the Halftime Game of the Year So Far?

Welcome back to the #1 Column to re-watch DOOM over the weekend and think it is still one of the better video game movies to be made, WORKING TITLE.

How are you all doing today? You doin' well? That's nice.

Did you know it's been almost TWO YEARS since Working Title's debut? That's fuckin' trippy and it's one of the longest running columns in the Games Zone? I didn't know that until someone just told me.

Ego stroking aside, this week we are finally done with the Halftime Awards(GOTYsf winner is at the bottom if you just want to scroll down to see it if that's the only reason you clicked it.) And this week in honor of good video game movies like DOOM, Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil (if you disagree with me, oh fuckin' well) we are going to do a Working Title Casting Call. With the sudden influx of greenlit video game movies on the horizon, I think it's time we all sat down and looked at who should play who (as well as who SHOULD'VE played who) in some of our favorite video game movies.

Comic book movies have been the newest craze to hit hollywood next to akward Judd Apatow screenplays and crappy horror movies. It seems like things that geeks like are becomming even more of the norm. However, video game movies still haven't hit that same level of greatness like the comic book movies have, some blame it on the source material, others blame it on bad german directors, and a lot of them just blame it on the fact that video games aren't as widely accepted as thier comic book counterparts.

But with great video games getting greenlit into movies now popping up, it seems like video games might finally be able to have a box office draw that isn't completely horrible. With games like Gears of War, Asassissin's Creed, God of War and Prince of Persia heading to the big screen can it finally be time for the video game movie to have it's time in the Hollywood limelight?

Working Title: Casting Call

Personally, I think video game movies tend to fail because of a mixture of all of the above reasons coupled with one very crucial thing that I hold near and dear.

Casting.

Sure, the source material and direction is pretty fuckin' terrible when it comes to most video game movies. But sometimes just having someone cast correctly in the right role can cause a WORLD of difference. So this week I'm going to look at two greenlit movies and two video game movies that have already been made and dream cast (get it?) them. Sure, it's a bit 'fantasy booking' like. But you know what? Fuck it. You didn't come here to read fact.

...But if you take anything I say as fact, you are one gullible motherfucker.

Gears of War



If there is one thing that Hollywood and Video Games have in common, it's the fact that they both know that people LOVE guns and blowing shit up. I think this makes Gears of War a prime candidate for the silver screen treatment as it as already been greenlit. It's not exactly hard to cast for this type of movie. You just need a whole bunch of badasses who really don't mine looking like badass meatheads on the big screen. A bit of stuntwork and some CGI/Green Screen filming can pretty much handle the rest of it.

With that said, who should be playing who?


David 'Batista' Bautista as Marcus Fenix



If you are looking at this and thinking that I only cast a wrestler for this role because this is 411mania and the whole world revovles around wrestling, you'd be pretty wrong. A lot of thought actually went into this choice. For starters Marcus and Batista look exactly ALMOST a like in size and facial features. Another plus is that you can say what you want about wrestlers, but if there's one thing they know how to do it's how to at least ACT like they are a huge badass. Now I know Batista might struggle when it comes to the emotional aspect of Mr. Fenix, but I'm pretty sure an acting coach can handle those problems.

Another big part of this role is that with it's going to have a lot of physical input. Wrestling is fake, we all know this, but we also know that you still have to be in SOME sort of shape to put your body through all of the crap they put thier bodies through. Of course we all know that Batista is a bit injury prone, but if you think about it filming a movie is probably safer for him that wrestling in a ring. Here they can use all of the mats, wires, pads, and reshots thier little steroid addled hearts can handle.

Yeah, I went there.

Either way, we can debate all day if Batista has the acting chops to carry such a character like Marcus, but then again we have to remember that this is Gears of War and NOT Saving Private Ryan we're talking about here. He's a big guy who can take a hit and looks awesome shooting a gun. Case closed.

Karl Urban as Dom

This one is a bit trickier. If this was a perfect world we could just clone Batista and have him play Marcus and Dom seeing as he'd be a good fit for either. But if Eddie Murphy has taught us anything, it's that the art of playing multiple characters is completely and utterly dead.

That leaves us at a bit of an empass. Do we just leave Dom out of the movie completely or do we get someone who's tried and true in the sort of role Dom would require and sacrifice things like size and acting ability to acheive the same goal.

I think we'll go from the later. As we have seen in DOOM(really, it IS a good movie), Urban has the ability to play the calm and collected (yet badass) gun toting hero, as well as the ability to do some of the more physical aspects of the role. Watch him in Pathfinder, he was pretty awesome there, too. While I don't think this is the best possible choice to play someone such as Dom, I do think that it's the best choice I can think of and the best choice they could get. I could be wrong, though. What do you think?

Sean William Scott as Baird

Yes. Stifler as Baird. Say what you want about the guy, but I think casting someone who can obviously pull off the comic relief role would be the perfect choice for someone like Baird (who was actually one of my favorite characters in the game). I personally haven't seen SWS in anything noteworthy since The Rundown, but then again, he wasn't in anything else noteworthy outside of American Pie and Dude, Where's My Car? before that.

Any of you that have seen The Rundown can agree that although SWS might be smaller than most of the Gears guys (who are seriously fucking huge) he at least has the physiqe and physical chops to pull off a role that will no doubt have him in for a lot of physical interaction and gunplay.

It's another one of those hard to cast ones, but it does bring up a funny little point. Has anyone else noticed that Marcus, Dom, and Fenix all look exactly alike if you just change the hairstyles?

Lester Speight as Agustus Cole

There are very few 'perfect' things in this world. This is one of them. It's always perfect when you know 100% that a role will work. For those of you that haven't caught on, Lester is also the voice of Cole and as you can tell by the pictures, he actually looks enough like him to carry the role as well.

The man is an ex-football player and generally a very funny motherfucker in real life. If you don't beleive me, go to Youtube and type in "Office Linebaker" and proceed to laugh your balls off. If this movie ever gets made and they do not cast this man as Cole, there is just no fucking up for it. None at all.

So looking at the casting of this movie, you got a pretty eclectic cast here. I don't know of Hollywood is going to rest a movie on a wrestler that isn't The Rock after box office flops like The Condemned and The Marine. But I do think that if they evber did cast this movie like this that it would actually be pretty sensical. One thing most video game fans pick out the most about these sort of movies is that the actors never look like the characters they are portraying and my take on that is the less make up and changes you have to make to the actor to look like the character, the better. Acting talent of the cast is debateable...but like I said before, it's Gears of War not Saving Private Ryan.


Asassin's Creed



Now with Gears of War, I can understand how that got greenlit into a movie. I'm having a hard time thinking of why they are planning to make Assassin's Creed into a movie. It dosen't seem like it's that much of a good game to begin with...well, it was a good game, but it really didn't have much of a plot or a story that would make a pretty decent movie. Couple that with the fact that it only had about three main characters and well...you see what I mean.

Either way, it's been greenlit and it's being planned so I might as well go ahead and cast for it.

Shia LeBouf as Altair

Hahaha. No.

Eric Bana as Altair/Desmond Miles



Okay, this makes a little bit more sense. For those of you who don't know Eric Bana, he is famous for quite a few films like Troy, Black Hawk Down, and Hulk( the bad one, not the awesome one.) and as far as I am concerned, he looks like he could pull off being Altair pretty well.

Of course, when you make a movie based on a guy who spends a majority of his time running around like a monkey and assasinating people. You can pretty much cast whatever actor you want as it and people will be bound to like it. The reason I chose Bana was different. WHile Bana does bear a bit of resemblance to Altair, he also has the acting chops to pull off the skulky silent role and then the wimpy "What the fuck is going on here" role of Desmond.

As you've seen in Troy, Bana will have no problem handling the action scenes but if there is one thing I am concerned with, it's his age. Eric Bana is pushing 40 and Altair/Desmond couldn't have been any older than his late 20s in AC. I don't know if casting someone that old will piss some fans off. But it might be able to be overlooked if he could churn out a good enough performance.

All in all, it's sort of hard casting for someone like Altair. Just given the very nature of his character you'd want to go for someone who looks a bit generic and plain, but then you'd want someone who certainly dosen't ACT that way. Bana wasn't my first choice on this role either, me and my friends have always joked that Bear Gryhlls would make a pretty awesome Altair if he wasn't painfully british.

Kristen Bell as Lucy Stillman

Remember what I said about perfect things? Damn. If there is one bright spot about having celebrities do the voicework for characters in video games is that if they ever decide to make a movie out of them they can just cast them again unless they look NOTHING like the character they are voicing. Lucy dosen't look that much like Kristen, but it dosen't matter. For most of the game she does nothing but stand around and forget her pen. Hell, the only reason she'd be in the movie at all it to keep it from being a complete sausage-fest.

Another actor as...wait...

Wait, there were only like two people in Assassin's Creed worth casting.

Either way, Assassin's Creed as a movie...well, I don't know how well it'd work. It'd have to have a lot of things changed in order to keep everyone interested. Even the game itself wore a little thin after the 3rd Assasination. I think this movie might be a prime candidate for development hell. But you never know, it could end up doing pretty well with the right changes.

But what about those movies that have ALREADY come out? Sure, some of the video game movies have failed PAINFULLY, but maybe there's still some good in them to have. Who should've been who in some of Hollywood's bastardations adaptations of our video games?


Working Recast

Jason Statham SHOULD'VE been Agent 47

Yes, I understand that Jason Statham dosen't have the Agent 47 voice. But COME THE FUCK ON. It's not like A47 even TALKED much. You needed a badass who could well...be a badass. It has Mr. Statham written all over it. Who cares if he's this generation's Steven Segal? Stevie was awesome for a moment, too.

Mariah Carey SHOULD'VE been Syndel

Yeah, go ahead and laugh. But I riddle you this...have you HEARD this bitch hit a high note? MKII was just a complete mess all around. Throwing in some sort of cheap celebrity top billing defnitely couldn't have made the movie any worse. Hell, if anything this could've propelled it into SUPER STARDOM.

By SUPER STARDOM, I mean it could've been better than Glitter.

Oh yeah, a steroid joke and an obscure pop culture movie joke in the same column? I think I'm ready to move upt to VH1 now.

ANYONE OTHER THAN DEVON AOKI SHOULD'VE been Kasumi

Really folks, it dosen't get any simplier. I STILL think Devon Aoki is one UGLY bitch. I just don't want to see that flat pug face on my TV. Is that too much to ask?

There was going to be a Working Question and Gaming's Unsolved Mysteries, but once again they will be cancelled in order to put something far more important in it's place....


Working Title Workies Halftime Awards Game of The Year So Far

So,it's finally time. It's been two weeks and now it's time to reveal what did you all choose as the Game of the Year So Far...

Drumroll please...


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GRAND THEFT AUTO 4

There you have it. You all decided that GTA4 was the game of the year so far. Now that MGS4 is out that might've very well changed but as it stands, this is the winner.

I can't say I disagree either. As with evey GTA game there's always a big divide between those who love it and those who hate it. As it stands I do think that San Andreas was a better game than GTA4 only because I like all of the wacky out of control shit you could do which seemed to be taken out of this one in favor of a more realistic game. But the game itself was still good, and a lot better than anything else that has come out this year.

And a little point to end on, GTA4 beat SSBB by 5 votes. The game(s) that actually got the least amount of votes at Devil May Cry 4. How the hell did THAT happen?

Until next ti--

Wait, hold on.

Shit, Piss, Cunt, Fuck, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits.

We'll miss ya, dude.

Until next time, I'm Jordan Williams.....and PSO IS THE MOST ADDICTIVE GAMECUBE GAME IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.