Instead we must ask why movies should matter at all to the video game industry. After all, we all know that Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and other movie-like games were almost universally panned as garbage. A succinct answer is that the new movie paradigm is different. Movies make millions, sometimes over a billion dollars. Movies create demand for posters, books, action figures, t-shirts and Halloween costumes.
Movies spawn popular theme park rides.
And of course, movies also create the basis for video games. It should come as no surprise that today's video games seek to be more and more like films the parallels and dependencies have been there for a long time. In the earliest days of gaming, some companies designed games derived loosely from movie classics, as Donkey Kong had its inspiration in King Kong. Then it was game designs based explicitly on recent movies, such as when Atari released E.T. and Star Wars, Midway released Tron games, and Sega released a Star Trek game. Then companies sought to synchronize the game releases to at or around the same time as the films released, as Sega did with Batman Returns.