Video game movie adaptations



Movies (also known as motion pictures or films) are a major source of entertainment as everyone can see them on the big screen. Some notable movies are adaptations of novels (such as the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises), comic books (including the Marvel Cinematic Universe), and even video games (the first-ever being Super Mario Bros.. Although the first animated film based on a game was Super Mario Bros.: Peach-Hime Kyushutsu Dai Sakusen!). However, many video game movie adaptations have been received poorly by movie critics and even gamers alike due to their terrible quality, as everyone called them as "video game movie curse".

Nobody knows why Hollywood tends to change the story, setting, atmosphere, characters, or designs for the video games when turning video games into movies. Maybe Hollywood thought it was difficult to always get it right.

Why Most Of Them Suck

 * 1) First and foremost, many of them have an extremely poor grasp of the source material, such as the examples listed below:
 * 2) Super Mario Bros. is a cartoony fantasy adventure, but the movie felt more like a Blade Runner rip-off.
 * 3) * It should be noted that Bob Hoskins, the actor who portrayed Mario, hated this movie and considered it to be the greatest mistake of his career.
 * 4) * When Dennis Hopper, the actor who portrayed King Koopa, was asked what the greatest mistake of his career was, he simply said, "Mario" (even if there are some games that Bowser said Mario like Super Mario Sunshine and Bowser's Inside Story).
 * 5) * It was so critically panned that at one point, this movie was almost completely out of print worldwide, never released digitally, and is not available to stream anywhere, possibly due to Nintendo themselves trying to erase it from existence. Despite this, some countries like Australia have re-released the movie in recent years on DVD, Blu-Ray, and Digital, likely to coincide with the upcoming 2023 adaptation.
 * 6) Alone in the Dark is a survival horror game about private investigator Edward Carnby going through a haunted mansion filled with monsters in the early 20th century but the movie was a completely generic action-horror movie with almost no relevance.
 * 7) Doom is about a single marine killing demons through Mars and Hell, but in this movie, all the "demons" were actually mutated humans. It featured a squad of soldiers, and Hell was totally absent, which is completely unforgivable for its source material. The first-person scene was rather awesome though, and at least better than the sequel, which turned Doom Guy into a woman and the actress forced her feminism.
 * 8) House of the Dead is about two AMS agents investigating the area where people were infected and killed. But in this movie, it's about a mad scientist going to an island filled with zombies searching for college students to escape the island.
 * 9) Wing Commander's film adaptation added a few unnecessary plot elements that were never in the games in the first place, such as Blair having the power to navigate through space without a NAV computer. The characters were also nothing like how they were in the games, and many of the spaceships and lore were very different from what they were in in-game form.
 * 10) Most of these movies were in poorly done live-action, with very few being animated.
 * 11) Most of the character designs or costume designs differ way too much from the iconic originals for no other reason than to get people to watch it.
 * 12) The title design is in a different typeface rather than the iconic respective typeface that is regularly used in video games for no apparent reason.
 * 13) Video game companies usually have little to no involvement with these movies and eventually disliked them. One notable example was Nintendo, who, after Super Mario Bros., decided not to allow any more film adaptations of their properties like the canceled CGI-animated film based on The Legend of Zelda by Imagi Animation Studios. (known for mh:greatestmovies:TMNT and Astro Boy) However, they changed their mind in 2017 when they announced that they were making a computer-animated movie with Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment, who also created the mh:greatestmovies:Despicable Me films and mh:greatestmovies:The Secret Life of Pets, to be released in 2023, starring Chris Pratt as the voice of Mario. id Software has confirmed they didn't involve the work of Doom: Annihilation due to the absence of Doomguy (or Doom Slayer) and Amy Manson said infamously on Twitter "Who needs Doomguy" where it leads to the biggest backlash.
 * 14) Whenever a movie has a bunch of video game characters with most of them having no personality, background, or characterization, the studio commonly uses the "it's based on the game" or “If you know their names or know how they look like then you know who they are” excuse. The Mortal Kombat movies are notorious for having that problem - Mortal Kombat Annihilation, (2021), and Battle of the Realms, most of the time whenever they add a bunch of characters - they'll be used just to be added in the body count, extend the runtime, or just to be there because of the characters' popularity.
 * 15) Sometimes, certain people are miscast as particular videogame characters, like Ryan Reynolds as Pikachu, Ben Schwartz as Sonic the Hedgehog, Tom Holland, and Mark Wahlberg as Nathan Drake and Sully respectively, and Chris Pratt as Mario himself, the former two of which received positive reception for their performance as the character.
 * 16) It feels like the people behind the film haven't played any respective game the film is based on or at least do good research via with supervision of the video game company. Sometimes they do lazy research which never fixes the problem.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) There are exceptions to the terrible video game movie stereotype, where the movie can (at the very least) be entertaining. Some examples include:
 * 2) *the 1995 version of Mortal Kombat
 * 3) *the OVA version of Sonic the Hedgehog
 * 4) *Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!
 * 5) *Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
 * 6) *Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie
 * 7) *Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation
 * 8) *Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist,
 * 9) *Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
 * 10) *Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
 * 11) *Resident Evil: Degeneration
 * 12) *Resident Evil: Damnation
 * 13) *Resident Evil: Vendetta
 * 14) *Persona 3 movies (1-4)
 * 15) *Need for Speed (2014 film)
 * 16) *The Angry Birds Movie (depending on your opinion) and its sequel
 * 17) *the 2018 version of mh:greatestmovies:Tomb Raider
 * 18) *mh:greatestmovies:Rampage
 * 19) *Most Pokemon movies (with the exceptions of The First Movie (English dub), Hoopa and the Clash Of Ages, and I Choose You)
 * 20) *Detective Pikachu
 * 21) *Detention (2019)
 * 22) *the 2020 version of Sonic the Hedgehog and its sequel.
 * 23) *Werewolves Within
 * 24) *Uncharted
 * 25) Lately many video game studios have been focusing on making Video Game Adaptations right, such as Arcane, The Cuphead Show, Shenmue, Persona 4 The Animation, the 2020 version of Sonic the Hedgehog and its sequel, Pokémon Detective Pikachu, The Angry Birds Movie and its sequel, Need for Speed (2014 film), and Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge.
 * 26) While films based on games tend to suck, TV shows based on games are at least ten times better, although it isn't always guaranteed, as there are still some bad/mediocre ones.

How To Break The Infamous Video Game Movie Curse

 * 1) Make sure that the movie stays faithful to its original source material, with little to no changes.
 * 2) Hire a good set of writers, mainly writers that are both huge fans of the original source material and truly understand the source material to heart really well or writers from the original source material (unless they've died).
 * 3) Not to mention, hire a good set of voice actors, mainly voice actors that are both huge fans of the original source material and truly understand the source material to heart really well or actors from the original source material. Also, hire actors that fit the role, or at least do a good job with what they're given.
 * 4) When it comes to kids movies, make sure the movie is animated (or a live-action/CGI hybrid one is fine if you know what you're doing).
 * 5) Make sure video game companies who worked on the source material have plenty of involvement with the film.
 * 6) Give the characters a great amount of personality and avoid flanderizing them.
 * 7) More importantly: ALWAYS GET IT RIGHT!

Trivia

 * This page was originally created by Official-PSASD (formerly Cpend7) on Crappy Games Wiki.

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