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(Firstly, this column will go into spoilers, so if you haven’t seen Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, then to be honest, you’re not missing out on very much.)

“I hope that we will be producing Final Fantasy 23 with Columbia when I have much more grey hair,” joked producer Jun Aida, and president of Square Pictures. “Hopefully, there will be many more projects out there.” Unfortunately for Aida, there weren’t.

Video games company Square initially set up Square Pictures, a studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, back in 1997. The intention was to create a Final Fantasy movie, and other projects should it prove successful. Originally budgeted at $70 million, it spiralled out to $137 million. “We did end up spending more than what we planned,” said producer Aida, “but it’s not by any means a massive number compared to what other major studios have spent on similar features,” The Honolulu studio itself was believed to have used up $40 - $45 million of the budget.

A teaser trailer debuted about a year before the film opened, and during the run up to release the buzz was hot, with the unique selling point being the highly detailed, computer generated look. While Toy Story set the standard back in 1995 as the first entirely computer generated feature film, this was the first go with humans as lead characters. The photo realistic detail was so amazing that if you didn't know this was computer generated you could almost mistake some (mostly close up) scenes for the real thing. There was even a scare as a small band of actors become worried that “computer actors” could replace them. The creators boasted about the CGI effects and the 60,000 strands of hair on their main character Aki Ross, who for a fictional character even managed the bizarre feat of making it into Maxim’s top 100 in 2001.

Distributed by Sony/Columbia, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within opened on Wednesday, July 11, 2001, and reached the top of the daily chart with an opening day total of just over $5 million. With this result, and Fandango reporting that the majority of advance ticket sales from their Web site were for Final Fantasy, reaching the top spot that weekend was clearly in the bag.

By the end of the weekend Legally Blonde was #1 with a gross of $20.3 million. The Spirits Within had amassed $19 million since opening, but a weekend take of $11.4 million meant that it placed #4. Four years in the making and it barely lasted two weeks in the US top ten. Ouch!

Films based on video games were already having a tough time (they sometimes still do today). However, The Spirits Within was an entirely different story not based on any of the Final Fantasy games. The film was also written and directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who had also written and directed the games. From Super Mario Bros to Tomb Raider, no video game films were ever really watched over by the games' creators, let alone directed by them.

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