Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Why No Batman Dark Knight Game?


I bought my copy of Dark Knight today and it reminded me that there is no Dark Knight video game. What a missed opportunity. The WSJ says the Dark Knight DVD and Blu-Ray is expected to bring in $282 million during the first three months. I don't think the game would have done that much, but even half that would be a huge blockbuster game.

I'm not usually a huge fan of movies turned into video games (Goldeneye 64 excepted) but publishers and movie studios passing up a chance to make millions of dollars always baffles me. If every system can get a The Tale of Despereaux, you would think people could buy a video game for the biggest movie of the 2008. Lego Batman is fun but its not quite the same.

I looked around to find the reason the game was never made, but can't find anything solid. Does anyone know why a Dark Knight game was never developed?

6 comments :

Anonymous said...

As I understand it: there WAS a Dark Knight game in development, and this was confirmed by Gary Oldman in an interview on G4 a while ago. It was supposedly being done by Pandemic. When WB realized the quality of the film was so high, they canceled the game in order to shift interactive entertainment away from the Dark Knight as a property and into more cohesive entires... like Lego Batman and Arkham Asylum. If that's truly the case, I can understand it... not many Oscar winners in the best picture category have video game adaptations.

Anonymous said...

I heard that there was a game in development too, I know IGN had confirmed it at one point. I didn't know about the G4 interview. I can understand that Oscar contenders don't usually have game tie-ins (who would want to play the English Patient?) but Dark Knight wasn't expected to be an Oscar contender when it was released. It is definitely a higher caliber than most comic book movies but Warner Bros. didn't release the movie to win an Oscar. I think there must have been something else involved. Thanks for the info though thesimplicity.

Anonymous said...

I read, also on IGN, that the game was outright cancelled due to unsatisfactory development time and the poor quality of what had been developed. Still surprising, though, considering that it would be a cash magnet. It must have really stunk.

Travis Hendricks said...

Honestly, the simplicity brings up a valid point in the fact that most Oscar winning movies don't have game tie-ins. But to be perfectly honest The Lord of the Rings won more Oscars than any film trilogy of all time and there are countless movie tie-ins for that. I think the reason most Oscar winning movies don't have game tie-ins is because the game concept would be lame. As explained by JJGames, the English Patient would never work.

So all I did was bring this argument back to the beginning. Why no movie tie-in?

Glad I could help.

Anonymous said...

Actually there is a batman game coming out, Batman: Escape from Arkham Asylum, Which in return is not movie based storyline, but surely inspired by the film to start production.

Anonymous said...

Cause they needed the cast voices for the game, and heath had to go ruin it all.

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