It was probably inevitable, wasn’t it? If you sit and watch long enough a film where a chiseled man in some sort of tactical vest leaps from one blazing building to another, there’s going to be a part of you that’s like, “I could do that.” Not in real life, obviously. In life, you must take the bins out on a Thursday and remember to ring your auntie back. But in a video game? Ah, in a video game, you can. You can sprint, somersault, and fire an impossible amount of bullets at a suspiciously affluent army of faceless enemies without so much as laying down your cup of tea.
The interaction between action movies and video games has forever been one of respect, if not brazen appropriation. A decent action game places you squarely in the middle of an adrenaline-packed Hollywood film, while a decent action film plundered the vocabulary of video games: the missions, the levels, the checkpointed cutscenes where a bullet-proof hero cuts through masses with the same calculating invulnerability only a quick save feature can provide. If you’ve ever watched the John Wick films and thought they seemed suspiciously like an extended arcade shooter, you’re not alone. This article explores the history of this symbiotic relationship, which you can even find on mobile offerings like Aviator Game.
The Hollywood-to-Console Pipeline
In the early days, video games were very much the awkward younger sibling of cinema—earnest, eager to please, and occasionally a bit shoddy around the edges. The first generation of action-movie tie-ins cared less about really being like the movie they represented and more about being a licensing exercise. A licensed tie-in game for the ’80s or ’90s was typically always an opportunity to slap a well-known name onto a box and hope nobody knew that the actual game inside was an unplayable disaster that featured music like an irate fax machine.
Things did get better eventually, though. GoldenEye 007 (1997) set the bar for what could be done in a movie-to-game adaptation by combining the structure of a Bond film with the then-new first-person shooter genre. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (2004) turned a character who had previously been best known for Vin Diesel’s gravelly whispering into an actually interesting game hero. It wasn’t long before the games weren’t only copying movies—sooner or later, they were bettering them.
And Then It Went the Other Way
If the first few decades of video games had been devoted to attempting to please cinema’s approval like an annoying understudy, things took a turn for the better when game technology finally started to play catch-up. Suddenly, directors weren’t merely impacting video games—video games were impacting directors. The choreographed fight scenes in action movies started to look suspiciously like third-person fight mechanics. The way that films depicted their heroes became less classical cinematography and more about the ubiquitous angles of first-person shooters.
And, of course, there was the architecture. Films like Crank (2006) and Edge of Tomorrow (2014) flirted with the idea of characters stuck in video-game-esque loops, forced to “reset” after each loss. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, for all its dominance, feels more like the design of a sprawling, interconnected RPG—side quests, main missions, and the constant sense that it’ll all culminate in a battle where the screen is so clogged with visual detritus you can barely tell who’s punching whom.
Even outside of the most obvious instances, you can see gaming’s presence everywhere in modern blockbusters. The Raid (2011) plays like a level-action game, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) is essentially an über-long escort mission, and Uncharted (2022) was a video game adaptation that somehow ended up playing more like a game than the game it was based on.
The Online Evolution: Where Action Meets Aviator Game
And naturally, it’s all been made new with the advent of the internet. Gaming and entertainment have never blurred into each other as much as they do today. You no longer just view an action movie—you engage with it, mash it up, meme it into oblivion. And the games themselves? Those aren’t solo activities anymore. You plop yourself down, and suddenly, you’re playing against—or with—folks all over the world.
Consider Aviator Game, for example. It’s not an action game per se, and it doesn’t really fit into the old-school categories of casino play. But it has the same adrenaline-fueled, addictive thrill that action films and arcade games thrive on. Played on websites such as Aviator Bet Now, it exists in a middle ground between the two: it’s all about waiting, taking chances, and the thrill of uncertainty.
It’s not about bludgeoning your way through a faceless enemy mob, but it is about testing your nerve and finding out if you can make it through the numbers. And isn’t that the thread that runs through all action movies ever made?
Where It All Goes From Here
It’s hard to say where this will go, mostly because entertainment is no longer something that things happen to people—it’s something they do themselves. Games borrow from movies, movies borrow from games, and between the two, social media appears and turns everything into an interactive experience. There are people nowadays who don’t just watch action movies; they re-edit them into playable bits in sandbox games. There are players who don’t just play—they stream, commentate, and construct entire cinematic experiences on their victories and defeats.
The distinction between “passive” and “interactive” entertainment has more or less collapsed. Whether you’re shooting your way through a level in Call of Duty, betting on an outcome in Aviator Game, or watching an actor perform stunts in a film that were clearly storyboarded by someone who grew up playing Metal Gear Solid, you’re part of the same ecosystem.
And in the end, that’s what keeps it interesting. Action movies and computer games are both there for the same fundamental reason: to allow you to experience feelings of thrills without the reality of being shot, leaping off a balcony, or destroying something that earns you a very strongly worded letter from the council. Whether you are laying waste with buttons, putting money on it, or just sitting there watching someone else do it for you, the thrill is the same. The only difference is what side of the screen you’d prefer to be on.
