10 Ways That Movies Will Change In The 2020s

While movies continue to do a terrible job of adapting video games (the 2010s giving us such flops as Assassin's Creed and Warcraft) and, let's be fair, video game tie-ins to movies rarely fare any better, the two media forms are nevertheless growing closer together.

By the end of the 2010s, the video game industry worldwide generated around $150 billion of income per year, so it's no surprise that movies would want a slice of that.

Games offer a form of narrative that movies do not, one in which the audience is in control and can customise their own experience, something that the twenty-first century consumer demands more than in any previous era.

Across the 2020s, then, expect movies to experiment more and more with a form of "choose your own adventure"-style interactivity, even as games become more cinematic in their visual stylings and storytelling, alongside casting A-list movie talent.

We have already seen the beginnings of this coming together of movies and games in the past couple of years. From the side of movies becoming more like interactive games we have seen Netflix experiment with the multi-pathed Black Mirror movie Bandersnatch, while companies like Telltale Games and Quantic Dream have increasingly produced video games that play like TV shows where you can choose the outcome.

At the start of the past decade Quantic Dream and creator David Cage were delivering a clunky, flat storyline and unengaging characters in Heavy Rain. By the end of the 2010s they had given us Detroit: Become Human, a far more creative, engaging and bingeable piece of screen entertainment than the very similar setup of TV rival Humans.

How long before a cinematic release of a movie in which the audience votes on the path of the narrative? It would practically guarantee repeat ticket sales.