Caitlin Morrell
Video games have been a part of culture since the early distribution of video games in the 1970s, booming in popularity in Western countries in the 1980s and still rapidly growing to this day. The growth led to franchises expanding to other established industries: toys, homeware and music, as well as film and television. The latter offers a lucrative deal to video game companies, whose beloved characters await silver screen treatment for adoring fans. But the deals, even when profitable, are often turbulent and have remained so decades later. Has this always been the case for the typical video game adaptation?
Since the first American feature-length film based on a video game, the trend in video game adaptations into films and television shows has only grown in recent years. As amazing as it may be for the avid gaming community, who grew up on beloved classics such as Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog, historically, studios do not deliver their adaptations faithfully. From earlier films to the latest, most fail commercially and critically. Everyone calls this phenomenon ‘the video game movie curse’. But is there a pattern to prove that the curse exists? Are there outliers and victims in the later adaptations?
Here’s a ‘video-game-to-film adaptation’ history crash course. We go back to the 1990s with the release of Super Mario Bros. (1993). With a $48 million budget, the 1993 film bombed at the box office with $8.5 million in revenue on opening weekend. An archived Wired interview explains the early negotiations between Nintendo and the director and independent filmmaker, Roland Joffé, in 1992: “The company actually had little interest in a creative partnership. For Nintendo the whole thing was an experiment and they believed the Mario brand was strong enough not to be derailed by a movie.” The financial failure, as well as the negative critical and commercial response, caused Nintendo to revoke licenses to film another adaptation of any Nintendo-owned game franchise (with the exception of the Pokémon franchise and small cameos in later years) until 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
The sour relationship between Nintendo and video game adaptations was a sucker punch to the gaming community, but all was not lost. A couple of years after Super Mario Bros. (1993), Mortal Kombat (1995) was released with mixed critical reviews but commercial success, earning $23.2 million domestically on opening weekend and $122 million worldwide at the box office, the highest-grossing adaptation of a video game in those few years. That high fell quickly when its sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997), failed commercially and critically.
Despite the profit they garnered for studios, Hollywood quickly diminished video game adaptations as failures
The list keeps going into the 2000s and early 2010s. The likes of Tomb Raider, Hitman, and Silent Hill – all popular video games – received average or terrible reviews. The long-anticipated Assassin’s Creed (2016) proceeded to bomb the box office and miss out on a hefty amount of profit, losing the studio between $75 million and $100 million. In the same year, Ratchet and Clank (2016) was released alongside a new video game. While the video game was financially successful, the film was considered a failure in every area. And still, that list keeps going with the releases into the 2020s with Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023) and Borderlands (2024), the former more critically and commercially unsuccessful rather than financially.
Despite the profit they garnered for studios, Hollywood quickly diminished video game adaptations as failures. However, the first feature films based on video games in Japan—ironically adapted by Nintendo—were critical and commercial successes. Generally, Japanese video game films fared better with their domestic audiences than those in Western countries. These films often retell the story accurately, but sometimes offer an alternative narrative to establish themselves in a different light from their source material. Regardless of what narrative they tell, there’s an aspect of honouring its source without retelling the source. The secret to a successful video game adaptation was found; adaptations can diverge from their source. The big rule to this was only as long as the core elements of the film are developed.
TV series allow more running time to tell a fully developed story based on its sources
This strategy was effective in Sky’s Gangs of London (2020-) and HBO’s The Last Of Us (2023-), which garnered critical and commercial success through its faithfulness to the source and genre while developing the source’s lore. Instead of being feature-length films, TV series allow more running time to tell a fully developed story based on its sources. TV series that are original works based on a video game’s universe – such as 2021’s Arcane and 2024’s Fallout – are also successful adaptations that rely on worldbuilding and character development that a video game’s narrative doesn’t supply.
We can also admit that there are some better-than-average video game films that subvert expectations for a (yet another) bad video game film. Many say that Detective Pikachu (2019) was the first to break this mould, followed by the releases of The Angry Birds Movie 2 (2019) and Sonic the Hedgehog (2020). A less child-oriented Werewolves Within (2021) also proved to be a critically and commercially successful film with the highest critic score on both Rotten Tomatoes and Megacritic based on films adapted from video games.
The consensus is that there is no such thing as a video game movie curse, but there’s no denying that video games are more difficult to adapt into film because of the active role that audiences lack when watching a film over playing a video game. There’s no saying what the future will bring to us, but with recent releases like Five Nights as Freddy’s 2 (2025) once again showing no signs of change, we’re still holding out hope for at least another better video game adaptation sequel.
Caitlin Morrell
Featured image courtesy of Jeffrey Gruszka via Unsplash. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
In-article photos courtesy of @newbeverly, @blumhouse, @universalpictures and @fnafmovie via Instagram. No changes were made to these photos.
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