Proof of my greatness: part one

Andrew Sullivan linked to a blog post tonight by some libertarian blogger named Peter Suderman pondering whether or not video games are supplanting B-movies. This caught my attention primarily because I wrote a blog post a little over two years ago making essentially the same argument on the eve of the release of Halo 3. I doubt that Peter Suderman was copying me, seeing as the post was on my friends-only MySpace page (mind you, I was writing back in the heady days of 2007, before it was scientifically proven that using MySpace marks you permanently as a member of the urban poor) but still, chalk me up as being ahead of the curve. Adding to my greatness, I also predicted in this post that The Dark Knight was going to be good, that Halo 3 was going to be better than any of the bullshit blockbuster movies of summer 2007, and that I'd never wind up seeing the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. All of which came true! The entire post is re-printed below so you can bask in my reflected glory.

The hype around the release of Halo 3 this week generally says that the game stands a good chance of bringing in more money on the day of its release than any entertainment event, ever. Traditionally, of course, big-money openings are the province of blockbuster action movies, with the current champ being this year's god-awful Spider-Man 3. The comparison poses an interesting question: namely, how long is it going to be before big mindless summer blockbuster action movies are rendered irrelevant by video games? My line of reasoning is this: of all the action films I saw this summer, the only one that strikes me as particularly notable is Live Free or Die Hard, and that's mostly because I expected it to suck and it didn't. I saw Transformers, but I can't remember a goddamn thing that actually happened in it. Obviously, the less said about Spider-Man 3, the better. In fact, pretty much the only one I didn't see was Pirates of the Caribbean Go To China or whatever it was called, which I decided to skip when I found out it was like 3 hours long. Clearly, I haven't played Halo 3 yet, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that it's going to be a lot better than any of those movies. With the level of production value and interactivity that games offer in the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 era, at some point, we have to ask ourselves what the point of watching some CGI robot blow shit up is when you can do it yourself from the comfort of your own home? Obviously, action movies will continue to exist for the foreseeable future, given the fact that box office takes are still rising and I still hear a lot of people talk about how they can't handle the amount of buttons on modern video game controllers. But you have to wonder how long that's going to last given the fact that by this point, the bottom half of the crucial 18-25 demographic came of age in the Playstation 2 era, and more and more of the types of people who might not have played many video games in past generations (read: girls) are getting into the hobby. My guess is that summer event movies will survive the transition, but they're going to have to step their game up a peg by emphasizing the elements that film does better than video games, like story and performance (I'm crossing my fingers for The Dark Knight to represent the critical step in this direction), because they aren't going to be able to compete much longer in terms of sheer visceral experience.