How do you turn any epic fantasy story into a movie? Particularly when it's a game where you create your own character, takes 8-60+ hours to tell the story and has such a long history to build up before before you get to the meat of it?
Why, you need a crazed fan to convince a major film producer to give them enough money to make three, 3-5 hour films. That crazed fan needs to know what to leave out and come up with a linear story.
Then they have to create a character that everybody can care enough about to see wander this linear path when the viewers could be exploring the wastes as your own character.
There's just so much more a book or video game can contain than any movie.
Good movies often have expansive worlds and histories made for them that you just never see.
I think it's better to try to turn movies with deep histories and expansive worlds into video games so we can explore them freely.
As long as they're canon. Then again, when you go back to a story teller and ask them to expand on their one great work because you're going to give them money, you end up with Star Wars Episode 1-3, or Harry Potter 5-7(Haven't read them, heard they were good, but missing the magic of the first ones.)
The focus should be making the game more immersive.
People complain about the engine for Fallout 3 and think it should just go back to isometric turn based, and I wouldn't be opposed to that.
But when I first came out of the vault and looked out over the wasteland from over the shoulder of my character, I got the chills. You don't get that kind of 'cinematography' from a top down view and cut scenes aren't as effective if they differ too much from the gameplay.
For a movie to be successful it has to appeal to a broad audience. They can't take the risk making it too smart because there's millions of dollars at stake. You can make it so the die hard fans will love it, or you can make it so the average person who's looking for something to do on a Friday night will spill $15 on. Because that's a larger demographic.
There's a billion things wrong with the movie industry that make films way more expensive to produce than they should be. If that were different, we'd see a lot more good movies by people who care to make them right.
But right now, that only happens when really dedicated people are willing to work for pennies(If even).
I think the only way you could really do a fallout movie is if you took a historical event or character from the fallout universe and made the story about that.
But the story would have to be linked closely enough with the rest of fallout that the movie would explain the history of this world to people who hadn't played the fallout games.
So maybe it wouldn't even take place in the wasteland. Maybe it would be a story about the state of the world leading up to the nukes, the construction of the vaults. Maybe the conspiracy behind the vaults.
For fallout fans it would be a visual history of events they've heard about from the games. It's not like finding out about the vault experiments would be a surprise to them, they know how it's going to turn out.
For newcomers, if it's a good enough story, the discovery of the vault experiments will be just as much of a twist as it was for us when we first hacked the correct terminals. But geared towards a group that might not be willing to go back and play the original games.
Otherwise, why even make a movie? The games are great.
). But, for the purpose of solely making something that the fans and them only can appreciate, a movie should be made, and if so not be scrutinized over the simple fact of its existence, good or bad.