It's like Khan and Kirk, really.
Executives at Paramount Pictures this week blamed lackluster sales and poor reviews of the Eidos Interactive video game Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness for the poor showing of its own movie, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life.
Now, Tomb Raider is published by Activision rival Electronic Arts, so there's no direct connection between Star Trek and Lara Croft. But I can't help feeling that it's a case of sour grapes from Paramount, directed to the video game market in general.
See, this past spring, Paramount's parent company Viacom was sued by game maker Activision for breach of contract. Activision (rightfully, in my opinion) alleges that Paramount has allowed the Star Trek franchise to whither and die -- and after absolutely wretched, diseased pigs like Enterprise and Star Trek Nemesis, who can blame them?
Activision, meanwhile, is turning out modestly decent games based on arguably the shittiest Star Trek franchise of them all -- the aborted mongoloid fetus known as Star Trek Voyager. It's turned out a few failures, too, but still, it's batting better averages than Paramount, which, as far as I'm concerned, gave up any semblance of creative effort when it shitcanned Deep Space Nine and really should have given up the movie franchise all together after The Wrath of Khan.
As it turns out, there's a lot of money at stake -- Activision still owes Viacom something like $9 million in royalties over the next 5 years for their rights to make Star Trek games. Sources close to the action say that Activision tried to renegotiate its deal with Viacom after producing a few stinkers; Viacom promptly told them to piss up a rope. And with millions on the line with Tomb Raider's poor opening, Paramount is trying to find anyone to blame.
The fact is, there's plenty of blame to go around -- both big game publishers and big movie studios are utterly devoid of creativity these days. The unimaginative heads of these companies are willing to plough absurd amounts of money into established franchises without any real thought of what makes movies entertaining or fun to begin with. In the movie studios' case, they're banking on the fact that big stars are going to draw people into the theaters, and in the video game makers' cases they presume that if they license the same tired old technology and a moderately popular movie or TV-show tie in, then slap some pretty new graphics on it, they can get people to play it.
It's sad, really. For a pair of industries that have been built on creativity, there's precious little imagination apparent in either movies or video games. I blame the MBAs and the financiers.