Wreck-It Ralph director: creating movies based on existing games is “very, very difficult” to pull off

By Stephany Nunneley

Wreck-It Ralph director Rich Moore believes one of the reasons his film was such a rousing success – one to the tune of $376,748,715 grossed worldwide – is because it wasn’t based on an actual video game character.

Speaking with MCV, Moore said there’s so much “mythology and baggage” attached to existing video game characters that when a film is made around one, it has a tendency to disappoint fans.

“I think that had we tried to make this movie about the character of someone like Donkey Kong, there’s so much mythology and baggage attached to pre-existing titles that I feel someone would be disappointed,” he said. “It was easier to take something that was new and felt evocative of that time period that was pristine.

“It was almost like virgin snow that felt like an old game but wasn’t an existing property that would pull certain members of the audience out of the story because it wasn’t being serviced in the way that someone would feel it needed to be.”

Moore feels creating movies based on existing video games is a “very, very difficult feat to pull off,” because it’s hard to please the different types of people who would go see it.

“If you were trying to really please these people that know it well, would it get so unwieldy that people who’ve never heard of it felt that they’re being left out with things going over their heads? They’d recognize that,” he said.

“We wanted to try and make this in a way that a person who’d never played video games before could watch and enjoy it without feeling that they were not part of the joke or the story.I wanted the audience to feel included, even the people that have never played games before. I think it would be hard if you were making a movie about a specific game.

“I can see where ultimately, someone would feel left out of that.”

Wreck-It-Ralph will release on DVD and Blu-ray in March.