Video Games Save The Movies II

I posted last week about how the movie studios could tap into the video game licensing bonanza that the music industry has enjoyed with the success of Guitar Hero and Rockband. A couple days later, I saw this story in Daily Variety about the company Yoo Star. The headline reads “Film may have found its ‘Guitar Hero’.”

Yoo Star packages a web camera, a portable green screen, and basic post production software into a consumer friendly interface for under $200. They give you a handful of scenes from actual movies to green screen your self into. It sounds mildly amusing, but its ludicrous to think this gimmick has the same kind of licensing potential as Guitar Hero.

Are the studios not seeing the same demos of the Microsoft Natal that I am? I assume that the studio’s would be clamoring all over themselves to license movies to Microsoft for integration with motion capture and artificial intelligence technology. I don’t want a half-ass green screen of myself in “Witness.” I want to be Batman, acting opposite Heath Ledger’s Joker. I don’t know how far away we are from that possibility, but its gotta suck to be Yoo Star right now. They’re selling a web cam and a green screen while the video game industry is building the Holodeck.

Here are two predicted downsides for the studios that contributed footage to Yoo Star:

A) Yoo Star will overwhelmingly be used to make fun of your movies. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that:
B) Yoo Star encourages uploading of the resulting videos! Its built into the marketing plan! I thought the studios had an aversion to uninhibited uploading of their movies? Now they risk filling the internet with inferior fan made versions of famous movie scenes, most of which will be making fun of the movies and their characters.

That seems like a lose lose for the studios, and its probably not worth whatever licensing fee they’re getting.