Rampage Director on Breaking the "Video Game Curse"

Bringing video games to the big screen has hardly been a simple task for directors, but Rampage's Brad Peyton said that he didn't even know about the so-called "video game curse" until his movie was already finished.

An adaptation of the classic 80s arcade game by the same name, Rampage has enough of a following and a powerhouse cast of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Naomie Harris, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan to help it succeed, but past attempts at video game movies from others can't be ignored. But with Rampage, a game that had far less lore to mess with than other games like Assassin's Creed, Peyton told IGN that the arcade game not having a massive following might actually help beat this curse.

"There's obviously a pressure to deliver on these things and to ground the movie and to deliver on spectacle and all that, but there also aren't these expectations to what this character's supposed to be or what this plot is supposed to be," Peyton told IGN. "I didn't know about this quote-unquote 'video game curse' until about two weeks after I finished the movie. A lot of times, [studios] attempt to adapt games that have massive followings. ... When you attempt to adapt something that has an incredibly deep plotline or character or something along those lines, you're beholden to delivering something. And it's really a difficult challenge because as a gamer, I know, I play as the hero. That's an immersive medium, and so, it's really hard to go up against something that pre-exists."

The three monsters found in the original game are the core parts of the movie adaptation as well, and Peyton said that getting those three parts right was essential to the success of the film. Accuracy was important to Peyton – the Rampage team even worked with various professionals to make sure the mutations and genetic aspects of the monsters were believable – but there's also room to surprise.

"My ultimate goal of this movie was to genuinely remind you, monsters are scary, but monster movies are meant to be fun," Peyton said.. "With these movies, the challenge is to constantly be unpredictable, and to constantly entertain. And I think the most entertaining stuff is the stuff that, you just cannot see what's going to come next. So when Dwayne's like, of course the wolf flies, that's just a little sprinkling of where these creatures can go and what they can do. We really drilled down on the science."

A new TV spot for the movie was also released recently, a trailer teasing a crocodile attack that can be seen above. Rampage is scheduled to be released into theaters on April 20.

[IGN]