Lucca's 60th Edition Books the Games-and-Cinema Crossover
Lucca Comics and Games is marking its 60th edition, running Oct. 28–Nov. 1 in the Tuscan town of Lucca and, by Variety's description, spanning the full gamut of geek culture and pop entertainment.
Director Emanuele Vietina's favourite seam through all of that is the crossover between the cinematic realm and the video game world — one he says gets particular attention in the cosplay side of the event. The booking that makes the idea concrete rather than rhetorical is CD Projekt Red: the Polish developer arrives with "Cyberpunk 2077", the "Cyberpunk Edgerunners" animation and "The Witcher", the last represented alongside its latest downloadable content.
That is what a crossover looks like as a booking sheet instead of a panel title. One company's game, its animation and its expansion all presented together means a fan of any one of them is already standing in front of the others.
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Vietina's framing is wider than the shopping list: Variety has him pulling out all the stops to celebrate crossover between different forms of geek culture, movies and video games in particular. The tidier that crossover gets, the more it resembles a studio keeping its own properties in one aisle and calling the aisle a movement.
The messier crossover is the better one. Kore-eda Hirokazu is travelling to Lucca to meet fans and discuss adapting Fujimoto Tatsuki's manga "Look Back", which Variety describes as blending live-action realism with the creative process behind the manga genre. A live-action director on the page-to-screen problem is a harder graft than parking a game beside its own cartoon — and it is the booking you make when you suspect those two audiences are one person.