Hollywood has a fascinating relationship to video games. Dating back to “Super Mario Bros.” in 1993, studios have understood that the popularity of video games was worth trying to exploit for the sake of silver screen entertainment. Unfortunately, that movie was a disaster that paved the way for decades’ worth of similar disasters to follow. It’s only in the last handful of years that the video game movie curse has truly started to break, with massive hits such as the animated “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” making waves along with things like “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Detective Pikachu.” Still, there are plenty of misses, with Eli Roth’s new “Borderlands” movie being met with brutal reviews out of the gate.
With “Borderlands” hitting theaters, it’s worth taking a quick look at the state of things. In truth, there just aren’t all that many truly great direct movie adaptations of video games, with Josh Ruben’s small budget “Werewolves Within” actually ranking as the best-reviewed video game movie ever. As for the bigger-budget attempts over the last 30 years? It’s been a mixed bag — and that’s being generous. There have been relative successes in terms of sheer profitability, with the “Resident Evil” franchise taking in more than $1.2 billion since its inception. However, it would be hard to say that any of those movies achieved true cinematic greatness.
In most cases, it’s been movies that are about video games in a broader sense, rather than straight up adaptations of them, that have found the most well-rounded success. Even dating back to something like 1983’s “WarGames,” Hollywood has often been able to take inspiration from the popularity of gaming to churn out a compelling narrative. This is also true of “Wreck-It Ralph,” which had Pixar-levels of mass appeal when it hit theaters in 2012, with the 2018 sequel “Ralph Breaks the Internet” also doing very well for itself.
Great video game movies not based on actual video games
Some of the better video game movies produced to date are in some ways about a game, but not literally recreating the narrative beats of the game in question. 2023’s “Tetris” tells the story of the famed puzzle game’s creation in a highly compelling fashion, using a real-life tale to craft a damn fine film. It’s not a video game movie in the way we traditionally mean, but it’s no less successful.
More akin to “Wreck-It Ralph,” we also have 2017’s “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” and its follow-up, “The Next Level.” These movies were remarkably popular, with “Welcome to the Jungle” becoming Sony’s biggest non-“Spider-Man” movie ever up to that point. The notion of sucking a bunch of kids into a dangerous video game and giving them action hero avatars truly resonated with general audiences.
Most interestingly, several documentaries have taken inspiration from the world of gaming to turn out remarkably great pieces of cinema. Netflix’s forthcoming “Ibelin” was one of the best movies the /Film team saw at Sundance this year. Similarly, the upcoming “Grand Theft Hamlet” was the best thing I saw at SXSW this year; it’s a movie that involves staging a production of “Hamlet” in “Grand Theft Auto.” We would also be remiss not to mention director Seth Gordon’s 2007 masterpiece “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters,” which may well be one of the most outright entertaining documentaries ever made. There’s plenty of good stuff out there, it’s just often not directly adapted from the video games we all already know and love.
I spoke more about this on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast with Ben Pearson, which you can listen to below:
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