Why Video Game Movie Adaptations Can Never Get It Right

Watching video game movies for the past 20 years has been a bit like watching a friend continuously jump in and out of bad relationships. At one point you have to ask yourself that maybe the people your friend is dating aren’t the problem, it’s your friend.

Movies based on video games are infamous in both the film and gaming communities for being unfaithful to their source material and poor quality.

Ever since the first video game film Super Mario Bros back in 1993, based on the famous video game series of the same name by Nintendo, this has consistently been the case. The ‘90s only continued this trend.

1994’s Double Dragon took a simple beat-‘em-up arcade game about twin brothers teaming up to save the elder’s girlfriend from a gang and thought it was a good idea to make a Warriors rip off in a 2017 post apocalyptic Los Angeles with a dash of a Big Trouble in Little China magic talisman in the mix. It wasn’t.

Street Fighter in 1995 thought it was a good idea to cast European action movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile, the all-American American with the greatest theme ever and make him the main character instead of the franchise’s famous lead Ryu. It wasn’t.

1995 also brought a PG-13 Mortal Kombat movie, based on a franchise that essentially created the M rating in the Entertainment Software Rating Board, and made a sequel two years later that nobody liked.

The only reason people went to go see 1999’s Wing Commander is because the film had a trailer for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace in front of it.

The first decade of the 2000s wasn’t any better as a majority of the videogame films we got were at the hands of German schlockmeister Uwe Boll.

Films like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne were massive critical and commercial failures, but were still successful to Boll due to his exercising of German tax loopholes that reward his investments into the films even if they totally bomb.

It also brought us the horrors of possibly the only real “success” in the video game movie world: the Resident Evil Franchise.

Despite being financially successful, fans of the video games have written off the films as self-insert fanfiction. Although the film is similar to the game in some ways, the main character Alice (played by Milla Jovovich) never appeared in the games and is essentially an overpowered Mary Sue that takes too much precedence over the other characters.

Thankfully the franchise is said to conclude with its sixth and final chapter of the movies this month. Now we can stop focusing on how bad these movies are and focus on how bad the quality of the games have become with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard also due out this month.

Speaking of the current year, let’s talk about this decade so far. The 2010s brought a recent trend to video game movies, but improvement seems very far away.

This trend: put effort to make the movies look professional, but not enough effort to make them any good.

For example, the decade started with Disney’s adaptation of Prince of Persia a movie that had a massive budget upwards of 200 million, starring big name talent like Jake Gyllenhaal and Ben Kingsley. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, essentially meaning that Disney was banking on it being their next Pirates of the Caribbean.  

It didn’t flop, but didn’t make enough money to warrant a sequel. While critics didn’t hate it as much as previous video game adaptations, they considered it mediocre at best and a boring blockbuster at worst.

Fans of the games didn’t hate it, but they didn’t particularly love it either.

This has also been the same in cases like Need for Speed and the animated adaptations of Ratchet and Clank and Angry Birds.

2016 also brought us films that were criticized for being too faithful to their games. Warcraft was praised by fans of the games for being very faithful to the fantasy world of Azeroth (the director Duncan Jones is an admitted uberfan of the Warcraft franchise) but critics and audiences were mixed. Many praised the visuals and world building while others criticized the story as complicated and boring.

Assassin’s Creed had a similar reaction from both its fans and critics, except for the fact that even fans of the game criticized it for being too faithful.

Despite all of these flops, I still feel that we will have a video game movie renaissance. It took a while before we got to the modern state of superhero films, where (thanks to Marvel Studios) it’s a seemingly never-ending stream of good quality blockbusters.

Video game movies are just going to have to finding a balance of pleasing their fanbase by being loyal to their games while not being loyal enough to alienate critics and audiences. One day, I feel that will happen. I just hope I’m alive to see it.