You’d never guess it from looking at his resume, but Vin Diesel is still a huge box office success. Not for his quality films (there are some… really!), but for horrible stuff like The Pacifier. The bald badass whose biggest accomplishment to date has been a random, online fact generator is now moving into Uwe Boll territory by starring into a videogame to movie adaptation.
Variety reports that Vin has signed up to star in an adaptation of the Midway Games property The Wheelman. The game and the movie will be released simultaneously in 2007, and Vin will star and produce both versions of the product, the movie and the game.
Being written by xXx screenwriter Rich Wilkes, the game/movie is a lot like The Transporter. It’s the story of an expert driver who comes out of retirement to protect a woman from his past. I bet he’s reluctant.
The game’s budget is reportedly around $15 million, which is rather big for a videogame. Videogame/movie simultaneous releases are nothing new. Nearly ever action movie is now accompanied by a corresponding videogame. But this is the first time I’ve ever heard of them both being created at the same time. In this case, it almost sounds like the movie is more of a promotional tool for the videogame, rather than the reverse as is usually true.
Unfortunately, this seems to be where the movie industry is headed unless someone stands up to stop it. With people like Mark Cuban pushing simultaneous DVD and theatrical releases and now money-driven projects like this, feature films are headed towards being nothing more than commercials for multimedia empires of off the rack sales spawned around them. As a wise random fact generator once said, ”You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink, unless you're Vin Diesel.”
