The Resurgence of Video Game Adaptations
By Douglas Faulkner
In the past couple of years, there’s been a variety of blockbuster films that have adapted video games to the big screen.
Considering the success of adapting nerd culture entertainment with superhero movies, this shouldn’t be a surprise, but just a decade before, adapting video games was seen as box office suicide. This stigma has stuck with these films from the 90s to the mid-2010s, as adaptations between these times were infamous for disappointing audiences and bombing at the box office.
The first live-action film to adapt a video game was none other than Super Mario Bros., released in 1993. It bombed at the box office, making $10 million less than it took to make the film and failing to resonate with both critics and audiences.
Most adaptations followed this pattern, and while certain properties like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider were able to create film franchises that always made back their budgets, they still disappointed viewers and rarely surpassed $200 million in box office sales. This stigma would eventually die out though, as in 2016 a big-budget adaptation was released that changed how studios viewed them.
Based on Blizzard’s famous property, Warcraft was the first video game adaptation to gross over $400 million at the box office. Additionally, despite critics’ criticism of the film, it also became the first to hold a positive review score among audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.
This success would be the spark for reigniting studios’ interest in making their next big-budget projects based on video games. Now most adaptations that release are averaging $300 million in box office sales, and one film has even managed to find itself among the highest-grossing films of all time.
Despite the infamy of its predecessor, The Super Mario Bros. Movie has managed to gross over $1.3 billion at the box office. This success places it just below Avengers: Age of Ultron and makes it the third highest-grossing film to be animated.
Film studios aren’t the only ones hopping on trend either. A variety of streaming services have gotten in on the trend by funding and hosting mini-series adaptations.
Before the age of streaming, shows based on video games were exclusively animated and mostly targeted toward child and preteen audiences. This can be attributed to the worlds of video games usually being detached from reality and the industry itself lacking confidence in low comedy adult animation back in the day. However, with streaming services allowing shows to work with bigger budgets, many shows have been able to portray things that would’ve been too expensive before.
Shows like Twisted Metal and The Last of Us are live-action adaptations that have made use of this shift. Both have been praised for their writing and ability to accurately portray the source material despite the more complicated environments and rules these games functioned on.
This improvement isn’t just exclusive to live-action portrayals though. With the rise of anime in the past decade, many companies have become aware of a market of teens and young adults who want more plot-driven animation. This market has played a big role in letting adaptations like Arcane and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners be backed for funding, with both having received critical acclaim from critics and audiences alike.
Despite their rocky start, the future seems bright for video game adaptations, and if another success like The Super Mario Bros. Movie happens again, we could very well enter an era of adaptation-based visual content not too dissimilar to that of the superhero one that continues today.