For the first time in history, video game movie adaptations are actually worth their screen time in terms of quality. Many would point to the success of the recent Super Mario Bros Movie as proof, but Mario only cemented the idea that the next decade in Hollywood belongs to video game adaptations — since the previous belonged to comic book superheroes. If anyone would like to argue that statement, we can always point to the ratings garnered by the Last of Us and Fallout adaptations.
We also shouldn’t forget tabletops; sure, video games might dominate the gaming market, but tabletops still make up a significant portion of it, and there’s plenty of overlap between the two. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a video game, but the entire world and its events revolve around randomized dice rolls, like in Dungeons & Dragons. The latter also received its adaptation to the silver screen, which was praised by both critics and audiences, leading us to wonder if World of Darkness would ever receive the same treatment and to discuss why it should.
According to online reports, Eric Heisserer, a writer who earned an Oscar nomination for penning 2016’s Arrival (we strongly recommend this movie) is currently developing a shared universe based on the World of Darkness tabletop gaming franchise. He will collaborate with Christine Boylan, a writer/producer for The Punisher, Castle, and Constantine, and Hivemind, the production company behind The Witcher and The Expanse. They will, of course, work with Paradox Interactive, which controls the rights to the franchise.
The World of Darkness is a world like our own, but much, much darker, with both metaphorical and literal monsters lurking behind every corner. The IP first launched in 1991 with a tabletop role-playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade, created by Mark Rein-Hagen for White Wolf Publishing. The game was set in a fictionalized “goth-punk” version of the modern world, in which players assume the roles of vampires, who deal with their nightly activities and struggles against their own predatory natures, vampire hunters, and each other.
The game was so popular that it was adapted into different media, such as a live-action role-playing game, a dice game, collectible card games, several video games, and numerous novels. Fox even produced a loosely based adaptation for television called Kindred: The Embraced, which was first broadcast in 1996. However, Vampire was merely the first tabletop RPG that was produced as part of the World of Darkness series, which actually consists of eight core lines of RPG games originally released from 1991 to 2002.
Those include the aforementioned Vampire: The Masquerade; Werewolf: The Apocalypse; Hunter: The Reckoning; Mage: The Ascension; Mummy: The Resurrection; Demon: The Fallen; Wraith: The Oblivion; and Changeling: The Dreaming. These are just the core games; there are plenty of off-shoots, like the Kindred of the East or Vampire: The Dark Ages, which are set in Asia and Middle Ages Europe, respectively. So, plenty of material to adapt from.
Now, the whole World of Darkness TTRPG series has been rebooted into Chronicles of Darkness in 2004, and the new series consists of eleven games, many of which use many elements from the previous games. We won’t deal with the reboot for the purpose of this discussion, but we will point out that both series are supported with supplementary sourcebooks that detail background and character types and often contain plenty of the universe’s lore. And that’s precisely why World of Darkness needs to be the next MCU-like Hollywood push.
The massive universe in which vampires, werewolves, mages, etc., exist in secrecy, clash with each other, and influence humanity primarily focuses on overarching narratives — similar to what the MCU did with the Avengers. Considering that the WoD universe has plenty of source material with overarching stories to offer also means that it has massive potential for the creation of a cinematic universe, with a bit of everything for anyone involved.
Gaming has finally become a multi-generational activity, and many of the big names running Hollywood used to be, or still are, gamers who actually came across the source material they’re now adapting. This allows them to produce worthwhile adaptations of IPs that come pre-loaded with massive, passionate fan communities that would gladly pay to see their favorite game turned into a movie, thus increasing the adaptation’s earning potential. Done properly, it’s really a win-win situation for both the viewers and the studios.
To be entirely fair, the World of Darkness is a massive universe, and it might benefit more from being adapted into a television/streaming series backed with an MCU-like budget and production values. Such a format would allow for a more granular exploration of an already massive universe, allowing production studios to provide an in-depth adaptation of each respective title and an overarching story. Even if each of the games in the World of Darkness universe receives but a single-season adaptation, we’re still discussing eight seasons of content.
That’s more high-quality content than most modern series ever receive nowadays, and best of all, it has already been written; it only needs to be adapted into an appropriate format. In the end, World of Darkness offers a complex and well-developed setting, which makes it a fertile ground for cinematic storytelling. But please, for the love of God, don’t let Netflix anywhere near it after what it did with The Witcher. It was revealed that the writers of the show “actively disliked” the source material, and now the fandom actively dislikes their storytelling choices. Serves them right.