The video game movie trend is continuing, despite like none of them making any money unless they had Angelina Jolie in shorts (and even that got boring). There's supposedly a sequel to Doom coming out, even though eye candy like Rosamund Pike can only do so much to distract the audience from the dialogue. Take it from somebody who saw Bloodrayne, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, House of the Dead, Tomb Raider 1&2, Mortal Kombat 1&2, Resident Evil 1&2, Street Fighter, and Wing Commander, it's not often done well, and when it is, don't worry because they'll find a way to screw it up with a sequel.

What really stands out is the continuing struggle for Microsoft to find a way to lose even more money on the Xbox, which sells at a loss but makes it up on volume. The Halo movie had its projected budget creep up to $200m without entering production. A cocktail napkin estimate of how much this movie would need to earn is $600m, and I seriously have to wonder who would rent or buy it. No matter how popular it was, who would get a bunch of their buddies together to watch "Halo: The Movie" when they could just play the game instead? I would think if you take a date to this movie and all you're going to do later that night is play Halo in your bedroom by yourself. This movie is like an ad for the Xbox, and the Xbox is like a subsidized platform to keep people from buying anything from Sony. As I've noted before, Sony is also working that, so I'm not sure how much effort Microsoft needs to put into it.

All that being said, what I really found shocking was this: there's a Castlevania movie coming out next year. Castlevania? All I remember about that game is using the whip under the stairs to fight the giant bat that was the first level boss, 20 years ago on my nintendo in between thrilling games of Duck Hunt, which I believe was actually the original first person shooter. With his dreck coming up, I thought I might just stay out of theatres... until I saw the trailer for the Pac-Man movie.