Ratchet & Clank Movie To Be Faithful To The Video Games That Inspired It
Adapting video games to movies is harder than one might think. As the world of video games has less constraints than the world of movies in many forms. Also, when adapting a franchise that is very much cartoonish in nature, bringing it to a big screen with a much smaller time limit in regards to length can be a challenge.
The team at Insomniac have been working for a while to make the Ratchet & Clank movie, and it’s almost here. Above all else though, they strove to ensure that the movie was true to the games:
“When everyone understands the universe, everybody involved understands the story, the characters and the motivation for the characters, then things go much more smoothly,” Insomniac founder Ted Price told IGN during a recent visit to Insomniac’s home base in Burbank, Calif.
Furthermore, they wanted to make sure that the way the characters were portrayed in the film where in tune with how they’re shown in the games, as the voices will be the same:
“There’s a lot of collaboration on making sure the characters themselves were cast in a way that reflected what we built for the game in particular,” he said. “We have all the main characters, actors, the ones who voice them in the games, coming back, and they’re part of the movie.”
Yet despite the struggles, it was apparently an easy decision to make Ratchet & and Clank into a film:
“When we actually first started the franchise, our aim with the project was to create a game that feels like a Pixar movie,” Insomniac Chief Creative Officer Brian Hastings said. “As a result, we’ve always wanted to see it on a screen, because we felt like it would be a perfect fit. And when you play the latest Ratchet game [due out on April 12], it does — it looks like a Pixar movie.”
Price added, “Literally in the trailer we have to say which is in-game footage so people can tell like, ‘Oh my God, are you kidding me?’ That’s pretty cool, yeah.”
The Ratchet & Clank movie will arrive April 29th.