Batman R.I.P.'s Grant Morrison: Why Can't Movies Learn from Games?

Grant Morrison, the comics savant behind titles and stories such as All Star Superman, The Invisibles and Batman R.I.P., has questioned the lack of videogames narrative techniques in other media such as the movies.

Discussing Sinatoro, a movie he is currently penning, Morrison told Comic Book Resources: "This was an effort to do something new, and we were looking at stuff like video games in the way that people are now experiencing narrative in a very different way. Old movies were based on theatre, which is based on rules that go back to Aristotle and the Greeks.

"And I'm sitting there in the 50th hour of Just Cause, and thinking 'this isn't a movie, there's a story here but I'm kind of participating in a new way'. So, why isn't this being reflected in the other storytelling media?"

Offering up a bit of understanding, he went on, "I know it's harder to do, but it's a way of taking an approach that maybe no-one's thought of before and saying, 'let's try some of the ways that videogames work and the way that narrative works in those games', because you can skip the cutscenes in a game, which most of us do, and yet still somehow understand the narrative. And I was thinking, 'that's what I was trying to do in Final Crisis almost, was to skip the cutscenes'."

Morrison has a bit of previous when it comes to relating games to other media. He wrote a screenplay for a film based on Midway's Area 51 (the film is, admittedly, sat somewhere in production limbo).

In any case, why aren't films taking narrative cues from games? Could it be that directors such as Prince of Persia's Mike Newell think that "You can’t do it (narrative) without the human drama. And the video game cannot do that. The video game can do all sorts of face-pulling, all sorts of: ‘I am a bad man, I have a mean jagged sword,’, but it can’t do any more than that."

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