How Hitman movies failed to take full advantage of the material

Hitman franchise has been a fan favorite for two decades already and that popularity has made it a lucrative target for making licensed movies. There are in fact two Hollywood movies made based on Hitman games: Hitman from 2007 and Hitman: Agent 47 from 2015.

I did enjoy the movies and I've watched both a few times but unfortunately they are not fully realizing their potential and I think are even harmed by the fact that they are based on the Hitman franchise. Let me tell you why.

Why these movies would be better without Hitman IP?

The way these movies are written are very straight-forward agent movies and unfortunately they don't differentiate themselves from the dozens of others.

Even though the games are popular, my gut feeling is that they are not popular enough in the target audience of these movies. Hence, the movies need to do a lot of explaining of the lore they are based on. Because without that, they would just be like any other agent movie with agents having super abilities. If they were not Hitman movies, they would have much more freedom to explore and focus and not have that much lore explaining to do.

The newer of the movies is basically just about the backstory of Agent 47. And while that is interesting in a long run, for a stand-alone movie relying on already existing lore, in my opinion, do something fresh in the world and not yet another movie explaining the backstory.

What makes Hitman games Hitman games?

If you think about the games, what comes to your mind as the core and unique part that differentiates it from other games?

Looking at the movies, you'd imagine it is playing with superhuman agent who is great at killing and who ends up in agent-like webs of mystery.

However, playing the games, it's not about that at all. It's about being the master of disguise, blending in and making the assassinations go unnoticed.

Given a single level, you end up wearing half a dozen different clothes, pretending to be a painter or a maintenance worker or a race team mechanic. In the movies, the Agent always wears his black suit and red tie – it feels like the makers of the movie only looked at the posters of the games and not the games themselves.

A lost opportunity

The reason I'm writing all this is that I think there are a lot of opportunities for interesting and unique movies that play to the strengths of Hitman games.

You could either keep it in a traditional agent movie style and just swap out the superhuman assasin into a master of disguise and create a compelling story combining MacGyver-like trickery with the agent finding ways to blend in.

For example, in the 2015 movie, in the beginning, Agent follows the protagonist into embassy and gets arrested by showing his guns around. Exactly like the agent would never do in the games. Instead, he'd knock out an embassy worker, wear their uniform and sneak into the place.

Or how about being bit more creative with the film and really play into another key mechanic of the game: repetition. Usually these type of mechanics in movies have been used in time travel movies like Groundhog Day or Arq. But skip the time travel bit and they could work perfectly in a movie like Hitman. Maybe it's a different/clone agent every time and the agents learn as a hivemind.

The repetition and failures could also play into a totally different genre, more like a comedy where the agent fails and/or succeeds in weird accidental ways time after time. You know, kinda like Johnny English. Well, I guess that spot has been already reserved.

What I'm trying to say is that the only thing that Hitman movies and Hitman games seem to have in common, is the barcode at the neck of Agent 47 and the black suit. Both of those are iconic imagery of Hitman series but not actually that important.

The challenge of moving a video game character to film screen

Another thing I think the movie fails a bit and that is in general a challenge when moving a character into the film world is that they are often stripped out of personality.

The reason many game characters don't have personality is because the player is supposed to fill in the blanks. Mark Brown goes into lengths about this in his video Commanding Shepard in Game Maker's Toolkit. By having a game character be a blank canvas, the player can play in different ways without that interfering with the lore and the world of the game.

While one could argue that Agent 47 is meant to be a emotionless and bit robotic, in my headcanon, he's not. To me, that decision feels like a reason for the main protagonist of a game to be as it is rather than a real design choice for a character. I'd love to see some personality in Agent 47 of the movies because watching an empty character is a very different experience than playing one.

In both of these movies, I feel like Agent 47 is just boring and meaningless. And he's supposed to be the protagonist the viewer is interested in.