Image via New Line Cinema
On May 10, Pokémon: Detective Pikachu debuts in theaters. Based on the larger Pokémon Nintendo franchise and the 2016 handheld game of the same name, the movie will have a lucrative opening weekend, despite going up against Avengers: Endgame. The initial critical response has also been largely positive.
This is contrary to the general perception of video game movie adaptations, which is anywhere from overwhelmingly negative to initially suspicious. And that reputation, unfortunately, has been well-earned.
And although these movies have largely gotten better, we have yet to see a transformative video game adaptation, one that transcends its source material. We have classic movies based on books, historical events, and plays. We have yet to see an award-worthy movie based on a video game.
Here is a brief timeline of failed video game to movie adaptations. Some of these movies are better than others, but all of them are flawed in some fundamental way. Let us hope the future has something better in store.
Super Mario Bros.
Starring: Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, Samantha Mathis, Fisher Stevens, Fiona Shaw, Richard Edson
Release Date: May 28, 1993
It's appropriate that the first video game movie adaptation is Super Mario Bros., and it's unfortunate that it turned out like this. The premise of the original game was simple: stomp turtles, defeat the dragon, save the princess. So why did this movie take place in an urban dystopia, where men evolved from lizards? Why did the Goombas look like full grown men with tiny lizard heads? And why was Daisy—the heroine from Super Mario Land—the damsel in distress instead of Princess Peach?
This movie had a problem many of its successors shared; the writers and director appeared ashamed to be making this. And so, they added on weird backstory and plot contrivances to make it "more" than a video game, which missed the point of adapting the source material in the first place.
Double Dragon
Starring: Robert Patrick, Mark Dacascos, Scott Wolf, Julia Nickson, Alyssa Milano
Release Date: November 4, 1994
The original Double Dragon arcade game opened with the bad guy punching Marian, Billy Lee's girlfriend, and carrying her off. Billy and his twin brother Jimmy had to defeat an entire gang, single-handedly, to rescue her.
The movie added a convoluted plot about an ancient medallion that must be united to harness the power of Double Dragon. It's pretty cheesy; more street fighting and less Asian mysticism would have done this movie some good. But what really sunk this movie was its box office take. It only made $2.3 million; its budget was $7.8 million.
Street Fighter
Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raúl Juliá, Ming-Na Wen, Damian Chapa, Kylie Minogue, Wes Studi
Release Date: December 23, 1994
Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile, Kylie Minogue as Cammy, and Raúl Juliá as M. Bison, Street Fighter had a bizarre plot about rogue mercenaries who infiltrate Bison's military base, where he created mutant super soldiers.
The main problem was that Street Fighter, like the video game that inspired it, should have been about a fighting tournament, with the best fighters from all over the world sparring to determine the strongest of them. All the political intrigue and spy shenanigans were unnecessary; we just want to see real-life characters throw Hadoukens and Sonic Booms at each other.
The movie may have missed its mark, but there was one silver lining; Raúl Juliá put on the camp performance of a lifetime. A classically trained film and stage actor, Juliá was best known to younger generations for this role, as well as for playing Gomez in The Addams Family.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
Release Date: Robin Shou, Talisa Soto, Brian Thompson, Sandra Hess, Lynn Red Williams, Irina Pantaeva, James Remar
Starring: November 21, 1997
The one-two-three punch combo of Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon and Street Fighter created a negative perception of video game movies that has never lifted. But in 1996, the first "good" video game movie came out: Mortal Kombat. The movie was ham-fisted and schlocky, but the game was also ham-fisted and schlocky. Just like the game, it was a fantasy remake of Enter the Dragon—nothing more, nothing less. And it had a phenomenal soundtrack, with a title song you could dance to.
Unfortunately, the sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, took all that goodwill and threw it directly in the garbage. The movie recast Sonya, Johnny Cage, and Raiden, while retaining some of the most laughably bad special effects and dialogue. Baraka's head looked like a cheap Halloween mask. And random characters were mentioned or seen in passing, and never mentioned again.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Jon Voight, Iain Glen, Noah Taylor, Daniel Craig
Release Date: June 15, 2001
After that debacle, video games were pretty much box office poison. The fans were savvier to the cash-in-quick gimmicks of the early to mid-'90s; it would take a massive A-List star, combined with a massive budget, before anyone would consider a video game adaptation again.
Enter Angelina Jolie, who agreed to play the role of Lara Croft in her first action film. It was critically panned as being a big dumb action thriller, but everyone knew to expect that anyway. More importantly to the studios, it was a box office success, taking in over $270 million, and reinvented Jolie as an action heroine.
A sequel, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life, would be released in 2003. It was somewhat more critically acclaimed and was also a box office success (though not as much as the original was).
The franchise was rebooted in (2018), with Alicia Vikander playing a more realistic gritty Lara, similar to the character in the video game reboot. It also did well at the box office and received critical praise, with some talk of a sequel being a possibility.
Resident Evil
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy, Martin Crewes, Colin Salmon
Release Date: March 21, 2002
Video game movies had a strategy: go big, go dumb, and go loud. They weren't going to have incredible writing or incredible acting, but they could dazzle the audience with visuals to compensate. And the Resident Evil movie franchise was indicative of that mentality. The series, largely guided, written, and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, was fun, popcorn entertainment, featuring Matrix-esque bullet-time shots, slow-mo impact shots, and lots of disgusting looking zombies.
It starred Alice (Milla Jovovich), who was created entirely for the movies and was not in any of the games. And although fans initially criticized the decision, it was probably the right move; there were fewer people over-analyzing the canonical consistency or demanding a slavishly faithful adaptation of the video games as a result.
There are six movies in the franchise; the most recent, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter was released in 2016. All six of them were commercial blockbusters; the fourth and sixth films both made over $300 million.
Doom
Starring: Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, Razaaq Adoti, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson
Release Date:
In 2005, The Rock was not the box office behemoth he would eventually become. He was more WWE Superstar than Hollywood superstar, and he was accepting the meathead action roles available to him. He played the villain in Doom, which was a little strange. But the role also allowed him to fire the iconic BFG, which made it worth it.
Despite some cool first-person POV shots, which recalled the original video game, audiences didn't turn out for this movie. It didn't make back its budget, which ensured its placement in bargain bins for years to come.
Postal
Starring: Zack Ward, Dave Foley, Chris Coppola, Jackie Tohn, J.K. Simmons, Ralf Moeller, Verne Troyer
Release Date: May 23, 2008
Uwe Boll is infamous for several critically panned video game adaptations. But the crown jewel is undoubtedly Postal, which was loosely based off the Running With Scissors game Postal 2.
The game allowed you to (among other things), piss on your father's grave, decapitate cheerleaders, light people on fire, and attack crowds with anthrax-filled cow heads, so the bar wasn't very high. Still, the movie featured a scene poking fun at 9/11, and another scene of Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush, hand-in-hand, celebrating the nuclear apocalypse. The movie won Boll a Razzie Award for Worst Director, and it made less than $150K at the box office.
Max Payne
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges, Ludacris, Chris O'Donnell, Nelly Furtado, Donal Logue, Olga Kurylenko
Release Date: October 17, 2008
By 2008, video games had advanced to the point where they closely resembled movies; Uncharted, for example, was shot in a manner that recalled adventure films like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. What was the point of making a movie about a game that was already cinematic?
The Max Payne game suffered that feeling of familiarity, even though the first Max Payne game arrived in 2001 and its sequel arrived in 2003. The star casting of Mark Wahlberg in the title role and Mila Kunis as Mona Sax did little to alleviate the awkward truth: the games were more viscerally entertaining than the movie that succeeded them. It did moderately well at the box office, but it flopped with critics, who awarded it a 16% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Present and Future
Today, video game movie adaptations continue to suffer from comparisons to their source material, especially when Hollywood makes modern games into movies like Hitman: Agent 47 (2015), Warcraft (2016) and Assassin's Creed (2016). The graphics within these modern games' cut scenes are realistic enough that the corresponding movie feels redundant.
Video game movies increasingly suffer from a need to be taken seriously. There needs to be a little self-mocking and humor in these straight-faced adaptations to make them palatable, for both gamers and non-gamers to enjoy them. A little self-deprecation goes a long way; there's a reason why Mortal Kombat, after 25 years, remains one of the best video game movies of all time.
This is why Detective Pikachu (May 10) and Sonic the Hedgehog (November 8) give us reasons to be excited. They're both based off old video game properties—properties that never got the HD, 60 frames-per-second, photorealistic treatment of newer properties. And both of them, thankfully, don't appear to take themselves too seriously.
Video game movies are here to stay, but rarely do they have staying power and watchability beyond the initial cash grab. Only a select few capture the spirit of the source material rather than adapting it to the letter or abandoning it entirely. Hopefully, more movie studios start to realize in the future that video games, and the movies that are based on them, are supposed to be fun.