Video game adaptations have historically had, at best, a mixed reputation among audiences, especially among those who were fans of the original franchise.
This was highlighted recently with the celebrated release of a trailer for the highly anticipated third film in the Sonic series, not long after followed by the Minecraft movie teaser receiving almost universal backlash, despite adapting the single best-selling video game ever.
However, despite the stigma, recent successes have managed to beat the odds to be enjoyable adaptations of beloved franchises, inspiring hope in gamers who have resigned themselves to mediocre or disappointing adaptations of their favourite games over the years.
‘Super Mario Bros’
It didn’t help that the first films based on video games didn’t have the best showing, setting expectations for everything that came thereafter.
The 1993 film ‘Super Mario Bros’ is often cited as one of the first examples of a major video game adaptation, and despite releasing at a time when the franchise was going strong, it was poorly received.
While some would go on to achieve box office success, they were generally criticized for weak plots, poor faithfulness to the source material, and lacklustre special effects.
Its complete departure from the game’s beloved and established setting into a bizarre dystopian universe aping off the tone of Ghostbusters more than anything left fans and critics bewildered, and alienated Nintendo from allowing any more film adaptations of their IPs for over two decades.
Throughout the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s, when the video game industry was proving itself to be taken seriously outside of its niche communities, film studios would try and cash in, occasionally taking their shot at several high-profile adaptations such as ‘Street Fighter’ (1994), ‘Mortal Kombat’ (1995), and ‘Lara Croft: Tomb Raider’ (2001) which tried to better capture what made the games so beloved in the first place, to mixed success.
Criticism
Video game fans would largely despise these adaptations and come to dread any more attempts.
But certain films would serve as some viewers’ first introduction to the greater franchise or would have their own communities with a cult following, such as ‘Silent Hill’ (2006) and the ‘Resident Evil’ film series. Animated adaptations would fare much better, with anime and animated films achieving far more critical success, such as with the Pokémon anime.
The tides began to turn in the late 2010s as video games came to be recognized as a strong, unique storytelling medium with its own merits. The release of ‘Detective Pikachu’ (2019) and ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ (2020) signalled a shift toward more faithful adaptations, embracing the characters and worlds that fans cherished while introducing them to broader audiences. Serialized TV show adaptations also started to show strong potential.
Mainstream popularity
The success of shows like ‘Arcane’ (2021), ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’ (2022), and ‘The Witcher’ (2019) series on Netflix, while not direct adaptations of the games, had broad mainstream popularity, proving that cross-media synergy between the games and their adaptations could enhance the greater franchise’s reach.
In this current wave of adaptations, fidelity to the original material has become a central focus.
The Last of Us, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time, especially beloved for its story, was adapted into an HBO series in 2023 and was lauded for its emotional depth and faithful recreation of the game’s story and atmosphere.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) had strong backing from the original creators and would go on to gross over a billion dollars worldwide, with fans praising the film for paying respect to the Mario franchise’s decades-long history as a cultural icon.
But there would also be the occasional stinker, like Borderlands (2024) and Halo (2022), that would serve as a reminder that even if there was more good to be had these days, video game adaptations could be just as bad as they used to be.
