It’s been a banner year for video game adaptations in TV and film, with HBO’s The Last Of Us TV series making serious inroads on the critical front, while Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie made similar progress on the “making so much money we’ll be seeing video game movies smash into theaters for the rest of our lives and they certainly cannot be stopped” angle. After 30 years of trying to crack the box office potential of a gaming movie—an effort that kicked off way back when with that other Super Mario Bros. movie—in 2023 Hollywood finally figured out how to translate one of the planet’s biggest entertainment industries into movies and shows that people actually want see.
So, what comes next?
It’s not a simple question: Super Mario Bros. might have confirmed that people will go spend a billion dollars in theaters to see a video game movie if you make it and market it properly, but one proof of concept doesn’t wipe out three decades of Doom, Wing Commander, and various Uwe Boll “adaptations.” And while games themselves have certainly gotten closer to TV and film over that same period—something Craig Mazin’s Last Of Us, which was a (mostly) direct adaptation of Neil Druckmann’s story from the best-selling games, took firm advantage of—games remain tricky beasts to adapt once you strip out the interactivity that forms a core part of their appeal.
So what does the future hold for gaming movies and shows? Ten years from now, will it be accepted wisdom that they can make big box office bank? If Hollywood wants those coins/gold/zenny/credits, etc., it’s going to have to address some big questions first.
Do video game movies need to be kids movies?
Look at the long and frequently bloody history of the gaming movie, and one thing becomes quickly apparent: They skew a lot older than you might expect. Leaving off the big tonal excesses of the ’90s Super Mario Bros. (which was at least hypothetically aimed at young fans), look through the list of gaming movies, and you see a disproportionately high number pulled from games that sport a Teen, or even a Mature, rating. 1995’s Mortal Kombat, the first gaming movie to crest the $100 million mark, kicked off the trend, but it’s visible throughout the history of gaming in film.
Partly, this can be chalked up to the intersection between low-budget cinema and horror: Horror tends to be the “put in a little, hope to get a lot” genre of movie-making, and that’s played out in obvious ways in the world of adaptations, where Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil movies have frequently dominated the money rankings. (Although they started slow in 2002, Anderson’s Resident Evil movies eventually revved their way up into solid cash-making machines, kicking out ~$300 million per flick off of budgets that never broke the $65 million mark.) Silent Hill, Hitman, Max Payne—to say nothing of Boll’s various micro-budget abominations—all took a shot at making money by tying existing gaming IP to established low-budget genres. Even Tomb Raider, long held as the “best” adapted franchise in gaming, did so by taking Teen-rated games and making them into slightly-more-violent Indiana Jones movies.
But now, not so much: After a trial balloon with 2019’s Detective Pikachu—a surprisingly great Pokémon movie bogged down by unnecessary plot chaff, we note in passing—and then the two modestly successful Sonic movies, The Super Mario Bros. movie was the first really serious studio effort to make a gaming movie that was first and foremost for kids. (It’s also one of the first purely animated Western adaptations to get any kind of serious studio support; before this, it was all stuff like the Ratchet & Clank movie or Angry Birds.) Nintendo and Illumination finally gave the parents who used to be young gamers a movie they’d want to take their kids to see, and it paid off in crazy numbers, proving that the market was there. After 30 years of believing gaming movies were for teens, at the youngest, Hollywood has finally woken up to the idea that it’s been underserving younger gamers. (It’s not for nothing that the one big horror game movie this year, Five Night At Freddy’s, comes from a franchise that made scares accessible to the under-13 set.) Expect to see more kid-aimed gaming movies as the next decade progresses.
Okay, so what about Zelda?
Nintendo’s Zelda franchise has been hanging over the idea of gaming movies since well before Mario started smashing records like so many easily broken bricks; the first clear reports of someone trying to make a movie based off of Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s other big hit dates all the way back to 2007. (Nintendo, reportedly gun-shy after the total debacle of the 1993 Mario movie, didn’t bite.) Now, we have confirmation that the gaming company is working with Sony on a live-action version of the franchise. But if we’re being honest, we’re pretty skeptical: Zelda feels like an especially tough Deku Nut for Hollywood to crack.
The biggest issue, to our eyes, is the fact that Zelda, for all the stories it’s told, and its handful of iconic characters, is neither a story nor a character-forward franchise. It might, in fact, be gaming’s biggest vibe-based success story: Even more than Link, Zelda, and recurring antagonist Ganon, the Zelda games are united by being Nintendo’s purest expression of the idea of adventure, of charting your way out into the unknown—whether that’s the wild frontiers of Hyrule in Breath Of The Wild or Tears Of The Kingdom, or the vast oceans of 2002’s The Wind Waker. (Recognizing this, and steering into it, is why those Switch-based Zelda games have been such confident successes.) More than maybe any other Nintendo franchise, Zelda lives in the play, and the feel of traversing those trap-filled dungeons or wind-swept plains or hostile enemy camps. And that’s a very tricky thing to translate into a movie.
Let’s look, again, at The Super Mario Bros. Movie. as a contrasting example. That film doesn’t adapt the plots of the Mario games, because they barely have those anyway; instead, it works by adapting the iconography of the games and tying it to some of the most recognizable characters in all of gaming. We can quibble about Chris Pratt’s Mario voice all we like, but watching the movie’s big action sequences undeniably shows the viewer Mario doing Mario things: Running, jumping, wa-hoo-ing, etc. Zelda doesn’t have nearly as many of those signifiers to hook into, especially in live-action, and it feels to us like the pitfall most likely to turn an adaptation of the games into just another Uncharted or Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time: Able, sometimes lively, recreations that can’t help but look a lot like every other Hollywood adventure movie, just with a thin coat of green-colored paint and some Triforce sticks applied to them.
And that’s a potential problem, since the still-undated Zelda movie will likely serve as the big litmus test for whether live-action gaming movies can match the animated success that Mario has now set. Like we said, we’re skeptical. (Although if you’d told us a year ago that Super Mario Bros. was going to be the biggest movie of 2023, we would have scoffed at that, too, so what do we know?)
How faithful does your gaming adaptation need to be?
We’ve talked a lot about Super Mario Bros. here, because $1.362 billion can be pretty damn loud when it comes to determining the future trends of an industry. But there’s actually another 2023 gaming adaptation that might be more instructive for a future path forward. (And no, not The Last Of Us, although we expect to see gaming’s more “adult,” “serious” stories continue to get translated into the more sober realm of TV going forward, rather than subjecting them to box office market forces)
No, we’re talking about a movie that didn’t adapt a video game at all: Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Drawn from no particular D&D story—but paying homage to thousands of individual tabletop sessions—Honor Among Thieves is a key exemplar of how to model “faithfulness” in gaming adaptations without letting the concept completely hijack your story. It’s not just that the fast-moving heist film namechecks beloved spells, magical items, and deadly beasts from 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks: It’s that it captures the feeling of playing those games yourselves, dialing into the blend of genuine emotion, high-adventure, and improvisational goofiness that comes from sitting around a table and making up an epic fantasy story with your friends. (That bit where Chris Pine’s Edgin has an illusion spell break down on him in the midst of an infiltration, turning into a horrifying flesh creature? Classic D&D improv.)
Honor Among Thieves did not, of course, make a billion dollars—it barely cleared its $150 million budget. But we can still hold out hope for it to serve as an example worth stealing from: Gaming adaptations that don’t try to recreate the stories of games so much as the experience of playing them; treating the medium’s interactive, experiential nature as a selling point, rather than the first thing to be discarded once a screenwriter sets to work.
(On a slightly similar note, we expect to see more and more non-gaming movies pulling work from what you might call the cinematography of gaming, lifting shots and compositions from video games. Ilya Naishuler’s 2015 Hardcore Henry is the most obvious reference point, adopting as it does the perspective and pacing of a first-person shooter game. But look back to Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, too—or this year’s John Wick: Chapter 4, which includes a scene that director Chad Stahelski has said was directly inspired by a top-down video game.)
Where do video game movies go from here?
First wave? Or high-water mark? It’s the question facing gaming adaptations right now; whether Mario (and 2023 as a whole) will be a never-matched apex, or the start of the next big phase of gaming movie-making. A lot of this, like so much of gaming history, will rest on Nintendo: Illumination, the animation studio that’s made its name on Minions movies, made their first billion-dollar blockbuster because they were playing with one of the biggest IPs in world history, wielded by a gaming company that’s been very selective about which of its brands it allows Hollywood to touch.
If Nintendo stays cautious—and it seems like it is, not rushing out immediate Metroid, Kirby, and Pokémon movies the second Mario was an obvious international success—it can set a new model for what gaming adaptations can look like in theaters. It’s clear, from Mario and D&D, that gaming movies do better (either in a financial, or a critical sense) by embracing the feelings of playing games, rather than tossing those elements out and merely trying to capitalize on the brand name. If Hollywood can internalize that lesson, then the future of gaming looks shockingly bright, for the first time in decades. Otherwise, well… There’s always room for a few more Resident Evil movies.