In the past couple of weeks, there has been a big shake up over at Naughty Dog. Naughty Dog is the studio a few people may have heard of by releasing the ‘Uncharted’ series as well as last years ‘The Last of Us’ just to name a few. The big shake up was writer Amy Hennig (who has been penning Drake) left the company followed last week by Uncharted director, Justin Richmond. Naughty and Sony have been pretty adamant that this was a mutual parting and there are no ill feelings which sort of makes sense since Sony has been laying people off like this was the Great Depression back in 1929.
I do really think this is the case and this isn’t a power move by Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley who have taken over as creative heads at Naughty Dog. It makes sense that Sony is cutting costs and putting Druckmann and Straley in charge and getting rid of the people that these two can effectively replace. It seems even more likely because of what’s happening at Sony’s film branch. The Uncharted movie adaptation is moving forward at breakneck speed now that a director has been found in Seth Gordon as well as a Last of Us film version getting fast tracked with a script written by Druckmann and Straley. What we’re seeing here is Naughty Dog and Sony going the route of Disney and Marvel and hoping to cash in on big screen adaptations of their existing properties and get in on some of that Marvel money that every studio on Earth is now craving.
Marvel had a similar shake up when Disney took over and the Marvel films exploded to astronomical success but theirs was more a restructuring. Kevin Feige moved over to head up Marvel’s film branch, Joe Quesada got promoted to Chief Creative Officer and Axel Alonso took over as Editor in Chief. Alonso would develop the comic books while Quesada would be the bridge between Alonso and Feige to keep the Marvel properties intact and working together. Sounds great, right? But what’s happened at Marvel instead is that everyone has taken notice of how much bigger business the Marvel movies have generated, and that, inevitably, has taken its toll on the rest of Marvel.
With the Marvel NOW! mini-relaunch (the name of that will hilarious plague Marvel for decades), Alonso shook up the entire Marvel comic book universe. However, things didn’t exactly look different after. Iron Man was suddenly Robert Downey Jr. and was in what seemed like every comic while at the same time, every comic suddenly turned into an Avengers affiliate. At this point, there are at least 2 Avengers titles coming out a week which is insane. Thor, after having one of the strongest opening arcs in recent memory, came back with an arc about Malakeith right before Thor: The Dark World opened. You see where I’m going with this. Marvel is shoring up all its properties into its movies, and the comics are beginning to suffer from it. I’m not saying that the comics have been bad, on the contrary. Some of Marvel’s best work in a long time has come out in the past 18 months! But with them being saddled with buoying the movie franchises, the comics no longer have the ability to creatively do as they want and they are quickly becoming formulaic. Ask any of your comic nerd friends about Marvel ‘events’ and how something so awesome has become so tedious over the years.
There’s a bigger problem lying in Marvel’s future from this line of thinking. What’s making the Marvel movies so great right now is that they’ve been drawing on the best and brightest storylines from their decades of work. Look at the new Captain America; it’s drawing off of the brilliant Winter Soldier arc Ed Brubaker wrote a few years ago and it’s being hailed as the best Marvel movie yet. Over at Fox, they’re using the Days of Future Past arc to retcon their timeline and it’s one of the most anticipated X-Men movies ever. So, what happens when Marvel catches up with itself and they go to draw on the comics for the next great movie and realize that they’ve used them all and all the comics that are left are the ones they used to help their movies out? Are they going to have to do that thing that’s become taboo in Hollywood and (gasp!) be creative?!
This is what Naughty Dog needs to learn from Marvel as they move forward. Movies are great and they make you huge money, but Marvel is cannibalizing itself and destroying the very foundation of this big business. Marvel has been pissing off comic readers for years, but the recent relaunch has been really annoying everyone. I myself am an avid comic reader, and I’ve begun to feel worn out by this very effect. Naughty Dog needs to keep focused on making what put them on the map and continue to make amazing, groundbreaking games that set it apart from other major studios and not put all its eggs in the movie basket. If I’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s that audiences are a fickle crowd so if the investment in movies doesn’t pan out, does a company like Naughty Dog really want to be in a position of having to reel gamers back in? It’s probably a better investment to keep up quality work in the game world and hope your movies can catch on as strongly as your wonderful games have.