Nintendo released a video-on-demand service in Japan for the Wii a while ago. Unfortunately, we haven’t heard any word for a possible international release for this service.

Lionsgate’s president of digital media, Curt Mavis, hopes to deliver their mass-media to the Wii’s broader audience, as opposed to just horror and action movies ideal for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 markets.

“I imagine the Wii’s movie store will launch worldwide soon,” said Mavis. “The essential point is that the game machine is already connected into the TV, and we see it as a major conduit inside the home to bring movies via the Internet into the television.”

Read (CasualGaming.biz)

In a perfect world there would be a direct correlation between a movies quality and its financial success. Poorly made films would founder and their directors would be run out of town at the end of pitchforks with torches following closely behind. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your feelings) some films garner enough money out of sheer hope or curiousity. How many of us haven’t ever seen a trailer and thought “this looks so bad I just have to see it”. Such is often the case with video game movies. Fans go to see them to find out how much of a mess they made of our beloved plots and characters while others get dragged along or go looking for a good action/horror flick.

If there was that direct relationship between quality and profitability we’d never have seen a video game movie after Mario Bros., but they manage to get enough between tickets and DVD sales, so they struggle on. Despite the disdain of both critics and gamers alike for the Hitman movie it pulled in over $100 million at the box office, so it seems that Agent 47 will be gearing up for another shot at the silver screen. Fox has hired writer Kyle Ward to pen the screenplay for the movie. If you’ve never heard of him, that’s probably not a huge surprise since so far he’s only got one released film to his name, though he did write the screenplay for the upcoming Kane and Lynch film. This early there aren’t any other details, but regardless of whether or not Olyphant will be reprising his role, I doubt Olga Kurylenko will be back as sequels like this generally dump the previous love interest to introduce a new one, although many would be happier if they dumped the romantic subplot altogether as there never was one in the games.

The film studios are finally figuring out a fact of making video game movies; choose modern popular titles to draw in the gamer crowd and choose games that allow you to throw together enough explosions and special effects to draw in the rest of the prospective audience.

Talk has been going around regarding a Gears of War movie for quite some time now, but reports now suggest that it’s not as much of a pipe dream as many thought. Chris Morgan, screenwriter for the film as well as Wanted and Fast and Furious has turned in a draft of the script and somewhere in a dimly lit board room the hazy, ill-defined figures who decide what gets to be a film and what ends up as lining in a bird cage are meeting to discuss budgets.

The epic nature of the story (a world being overrun by hostile aliens) means there’s going to be a big price tag attached to the project, which is generally the stumbling block for pitched projects. Morgan says that he’s convinced there’s no way to make the film without addressing its epic nature and that gamers will be happy with it since they put in all the things they want to see and “blow it out a little more, even”.

Only time will tell though, since thus far there haven’t really been any video game to film conversions that made the fans happy.

The video games that films and television shows have been based on are often poorly chosen and seem to be picked for more summer blockbuster potential than any other reason. Generally they ignore IPs with interesting character and well-fleshed out plot lines. That might be in part because it’s usually the big film studios who seek out these projects with little actual involvement from their creators.

Bethesda however is taking a more active interest in the possible direction other Fallout media could go. They’ve filed patents for both a Fallout film and television show. With the huge volume of material already created for the series there are plenty of avenues to go down. The main storylines and side quests of all three games give dozens of possible storylines; defeating mutants, questing for parts to fix a dying vault, etc.

The only problem of course would be the high cost of doing a Fallout TV show, with the budget for special effects, props, buildings, etc. Unfortunately a film probably wouldn’t do the well crafted Fallout universe justice, but I doubt we’d see more than a season of two of the TV show.