The future is here, and it is awful. It has just been announced that 20th Century Fox is working on a movie based on the 1980s book series Choose Your Own Adventure. “But wait”, you’re saying. “Movies are definitive statements by a collection of creatively and technically gifted people. The very medium of film itself simply does not lend itself to storytelling as open-ended and audience-informed as a Choose Your Own Adventure book.”
Well, think again. The big selling point of the Choose Your Own Adventure movie is that you really will be able to choose your own adventure. While the film is screening, movie audiences will be invited to use an app called CtrlMovie at certain junctures, letting them control the outcome thanks to a link-up with the cinema’s digital projector. Depending on audience preferences, the film will have different plots, endings and runtimes every time it’s shown.
Picture this: our hero is cornered. To the left, his arch enemies, closing in fast. To his right, a squadron of police officers, guns trained on his head. Above him, a rickety fire escape. Below him, an open manhole. The tension couldn’t be higher. But, hang on, here’s a big flashing sign onscreen telling you to pull out your phone, unlock it, open an app, press a button and hope that the majority of the audience feels the same way you do. The moment is broken, the outcome unsatisfactory and now everyone’s dicking around on their phones in the cinema. This is literally the worst moviegoing experience of your life.
That said, as objectively hideous as Choose Your Own Adventure sounds in a communal setting, it might just find a life on home entertainment. Because at home, you don’t have to rely on finding consensus with a roomful of the sort of mouthbreathers who’d willing pay to watch a Choose Your Own Adventure film on opening weekend. You get to be in charge of the experience. You can experiment with different choices at different times, just as you did with the Choose Your Own Adventure books all those years ago. Plus it’s your house, so playing on your phone isn’t the most hideous act of rudeness that anyone could imagine.
In fact, it wouldn’t even be the first time that something like this had been attempted. Twenty years ago, Aftermath Media released a movie called Tender Loving Care. The film itself was a terrible psychological thriller about a berserk nurse, but at certain points John Hurt would appear onscreen and psychologically profile you. You’d answer a set of questions and, depending on your answers, you’d be shown different scenes. Some of them – and it’s not ideal that this was the film’s biggest selling point – had nudity.
Nobody remembers Tender Loving Care now. And that’s not just because it was an objectively terrible film, or because John Hurt’s psychoanalysis was much clunkier than a swipe of an app. It was because literally nobody wants an interactive film. If you want to be in control of your destiny, fine, go and play Grand Theft Auto. But when you see a film, you want to see the results of thousands of painstaking decisions presented in exactly the way its creator intended. To see a film is to put your faith in writers, directors and performers; not the gurgling, 14-year-old dipstick sitting two rows behind you who threw his popcorn in the air at a Transformers trailer.
And this is why Choose Your Own Adventure will fail. It’ll fail like Tender Loving Care failed. It’ll fail like DVD alternate camera angles failed. It’ll fail like VR movies are failing now. A movie needs to be authored. No gimmick, however clever, can come close.
