The Best Live Action Video Game Trailers and Why They Should Be Movies

Most video game movies fall flat. Super Mario Bros. and Wing Commander were not so successful while other like Doom and Resident Evil are better thought out but maybe have a hard time living up to our expectations. Live-action trailers however are getting better over time. With great directors and actors coming into the video game fold to produce the best trailers we’ve seen, sometimes better than the games they represent.

Here are some of the best live-action game trailers we’ve seen and why they should be made into movies. This is by means a complete list, we went ahead and cut out all the sexually suggestive – whether intentional or not – trailers. Yes Kirby, we’re talking about you. We’ve also when skipped over some trailers for games that are already in production. Whether we like it or not, Need for Speed, Assassin’s Creed, Warcraft, Angry Birds, Gran Turismo and Deus Ex: Human Revolution are either in production or pre-production. As these AAA titles get more and more market share we can guarantee that many more movies will be made about our favorite games. Let’s just hope they’ll have more in common with Final Fantasy and less like House of the Dead.

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Any chance to take our favorite blonde badass action hero and bounty hunter Samus Aran out to blast some stuff is okay with us. This graphically intense 3D Metroid for Wii was a successful adaptation of the 2D classic released back in 2010.

While not being purely live action, this trailer’s live action portions capture what we want out of a film crossover. Attractive blondes in bodysuits, spacecraft, smoldering ruins of alien corpses, it’s all there. A Metroid movie would be the best parts of RoboCop’s emotional separation mixed with Iron Man invincibility with La Femme Nikita sensitivity. All wrapped up in an armored suit and plasma cannon.

When we said best live-action trailers we didn’t necessarily mean production wise. In fact we can solidly say this trailer for F.E.A.R. 3 is terrible. Unfortunately, this is an officially released horrible trailer that takes away from an otherwise great game. We have no clue whose bright idea this was but it’s probably best to let it die.

Unless we live in a world where people watch Sharknado! In that case this little teaser is potential academy gold! Shaggy haired ghost rape victim gains control of his reincarnated invisible hobo brother to take revenge on an evil corporation and (spoiler alert) have to battle each other to death to prevent the ghost world from consuming our own. This thing has all kinds of crossover appeal. Survival horror, ghost flick, action, it’s got it all.

While Ghost Recon: Future Soldier was a solid game, it betrayed its past by flattening out features of a tactical shooter in favor of first-person shooters. In its leaning toward run and gun and away from tactical gameplay, Future Soldier left us a little sad.

This trailer however, is amazing. These two minutes are exactly what we want to see in a movie. Invisible future soldiers guiding armored drones into battle while using Predator-like shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets! At the very least can we make this as the next entry into the lackluster Sniper series?

If you haven’t played through the Prototype series, you’re really missing something special. Beyond just a hack n’ slash this game really gives the player a sense of power. Charging around a city using the corpses of your enemies as tools in battle while putting your mutated limbs to good effect.

This trailer may be short but it packs in a lot of content. Our protagonist, a veteran of America’s wars tries to take his own life after the loss of his family in the great plague. Oh yeah, and we’d watch anything if Johnny Cash was playing over it. This has all the makings of a great movie. It already has a promising soundtrack, let Trent Reznor do the rest of it. Darren Aronofsky will direct and the protagonist gets knife hands, hell yeah.

This amazing series of live-action commercials for Ratchet and Clank features all kinds of hijinks. Seeing the huge range of fictional weapons and equipment in live-action is cool enough but paired with some documentary style filming, it’s fantastic.

We’re picturing something in between The Hangover and Myth Busters with a little bit of Darwin Awards thrown in for good measure. Who doesn’t want to see Zach Galifinakis innocently blow the crap out of everything in sight?

Skyrim should obviously be made into a movie. In fact every time we watch Game of Thrones we get a little more peeved about Skyrim not yet being filmed. Beyond being epic and having a huge amount of story and content to add to a film. Our star could be a Khajiit or an Argonian it’s a story about inclusiveness and slashing. Cat people and Snake people come together to defeat the evils of the realm, a unity piece.

And you fight dragons! If that isn’t the best reason to make a film we don’t know what is. This movie could easily reach ten hours in length and must contain no less than two full hours of running footage. Somebody call Francis Ford Coppola please.

While the Halo series got a great live-action web series in Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn we want more. Halo: Reach is the prequel to the original Halo: Combat Evolved and delves into the story of how humanity became in conflict with the Covenant in the first place.

This trailer has it all: sad emotional singing, nukes, the desperate struggle for survival and even a football analogy. A prequel to the Halo series would be the most viable film adaptation of the series. Picture it: Will Smith as a younger cloned Master Chief would work perfectly with this dystopian nuke fest. Although we’d have to keep Tom Cruise away from it, he loves this stuff.

The final entry into the Mass Effect series, at least pertaining to the life of Shepard, was an amazing finale to a great series. The ending left a bit to be desired and even after being fixed the amount of hate mail from BioWare fans was staggering. This series would be a hugely complex film adaptation, but the beginning of Mass Effect 3 and the subject of this live-action short, would work perfectly.

Reapers falling from the skies, morals breaking apart faster than fortune cookies under a fat man stampede to loot the all-you-can-eat-buffet, this trailer has everything. Love, war, space, giant sea-creatures looking space monsters, it’s exactly what Pacific Rim should have been.

In our humble opinion Call of Duty has some of the best live-action commercials. One of the best was put outin the run-up to the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 featuring Jonah Hill, Sam Worthington with a splash of Dwight Howard at the end.

This thing is a beast of content and defiantly should be made into a movie.

With Jonah Hill’s lovable incompetence and the hard-boiled combat poker face of Worthington they could get into all sorts of light-hearted shenanigans.

Example:

Hill: “Oh, no.”

Worthington: “what? What now?”

Hill: “I forgot to screw in my red dot sight thingy, now it’s just flapping around”

Worthington: “Stop!”

Hill: “What, I was just…”

Worthington: “You were about to say a penis joke.”

Hill: “Damn.”

For the ramp-up to the release of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, director Henry Hobson helped create a dark and moody series of promo trailers. Starring Dominic Monaghan of Lord of the Rings fame, the series portrays its version of America in the 1960s, in all its horror-based alien bashing glory. This final video, Aftermath, is the culmination of the series and we believe the best.

This absolutely should be expanded into a movie. It’s Mad Men meets Twilight Zone but with superpowers and good old fashion hands-on face punching. The XCOM series has been around for over 20 years; this series looks like it’s best chance for a crossover.