For the longest time, only one video game movie cracked $100+ million domestically. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider sure looked lonely on this list pre-2016, as most other video game movies (even costly features like Warcraft and Assassin's Creed) failed to even hit $60 million domestically, let alone $100+ million domestically. Of course, just a decade after The Angry Birds Movie became only the second video game movie to hit $100+ million in North America, that all feels like a distant memory. In the first few weeks of the 2020s, Sonic the Hedgehog secured the title of biggest video game movie ever domestically.
Since then, the Illumination Mario movies, A Minecraft Movie, the Sonic sequels, and even Uncharted have all amassed major box office hauls. Minecraft and Mario especially have become some of the biggest motion pictures (of any genre) in history. The video game movie, once box office poison, is now a massive business in Hollywood. There are several reasons the video game movie has come into its own. Gearing more of these films towards family audiences has certainly helped. Meanwhile, many people who grew up with Mario, Steve from Minecraft, and Sonic as part of their everyday lives are now adults with disposable income in the 2020s. That nostalgia-driven crowd might not have been able to drive one of these movies to massive numbers as late as 2015.
The biggest difference between new and old video game movies, though, is pretty simple. These films finally focused on concrete characters, rather than just brand names, people are familiar with. The quality of these features hasn't drastically improved. However, there's a big difference between promising people a movie containing Shadow the Hedgehog and a generic action movie that happens to have the Assassin's Creed brand name.
What Kind of Characters Did Old Video Game Movies Focus On?
The very first live-action video game movies, like Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, and Mortal Kombat, did bring Mario, M. Bison, and Johnny Cash, respectively, to the silver screen. Starting in the 21st century, though, video game films began largely eschewing familiar video game characters in favor of new fictional individuals. The Resident Evil movies, for instance, famously carved out their own new lead character (Alice) and ensemble casts. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, meanwhile, was adapting games based around an unnamed "Prince" character. That figure became the largely standalone new figure Prince Dastan of Persia. The Assassin's Creed movie didn't give Ezio Firenze or Edward Kenway a chance to shine on the silver screen. Instead, Michael Fassbender's Callum "Cal" Lynch was the centerpiece.
2016's Warcraft focused on a slew of various Orcs and humans that were unfamiliar to even the most hardcore World of Warcraft players. Need for Speed was adapting a series of racing games devoid of recognizable characters, so a deluge of new figures had to be conjured up for a motion picture adaptation. Mark Wahlberg's Max Payne, meanwhile, kept the titular character from the comics, but grounded him in a fantastical world with plenty of otherworldly beasties (known as Valkyrie) not from the games. On and on the examples go.
This is not to say the problems rooted in these projects were solely because they weren't loyal to the games. The Illumination Mario movies vividly demonstrate that slavish devotion to pre-existing material doesn't equal a quality motion picture. However, this phenomenon does help explain why these titles didn't register as must-see titles for most people. If you see an ad for a Spider-Man movie, you know you're going to see a story involving characters you love like Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Mary Jane Watson, and others. If you spot a billboard for a new 007 movie, you might get stoked that James Bond is back on the big screen.
Need for Speed, though, had no relation to the games beyond "cars go fast." A familiar video game moniker here just felt like a cynical cash grab, not a potentially exciting extension of a beloved gaming world. Without any specific characters to serve as connective tissue between different mediums, what on Earth does a Doom movie even mean to both hardcore Doom fans and casual moviegoers? When Tim Burton's Batman promised the first big-budget big screen version of its titular lead, there was momentous excitement even among those who didn't read Batman comics. Through cultural osmosis, everyone could understand the significance of both Batman as a fictional character and him finally getting translated into this cinematic form.
Compare that to Warcraft, which was adapted from a game where players customized their own characters and interacted with virtual friends in fantasy settings. What value was there in seeing Azeroth in the context of a narrative feature you couldn't control? World of Warcraft's joy came from interacting with your pals, not from controlling or meeting pre-existing characters like in a Mario or Last of Us title. The lack of distinguishable, concrete characters you could translate into a World of Warcraft movie epitomizes how that Duncan Jones directorial effort was a boondoggle from the start.
Frustratingly, too, eschewing source material didn't create compelling new movie experiences. This process can totally create masterpieces. Trust me as a girl who first read Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and then watched (and fell in love with) Steven Spielberg's movie adaptation, which radically changes the text. However, rather than producing the video game movie equivalent of Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army or Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, titles like Need for Speed, Assassin's Creed, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time were torturously boring. You got the worst of both worlds with these movies.
Lara Croft Offered A Glimpse of Video Game Cinema's Future
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was the exception amongst 2000s video game movies that proved how much identifiable characters could help these adaptations. I've never played the Lara Croft games, so I can't say how faithful the 2001 Tomb Raider film (which I found to be a snooze) is overall to its predecessors. However, I do know that the Tomb Raider marketing could emphasize a concrete character (Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft!) that audiences could finally see in a live-action movie. This wasn't just a generic action film incidentally featuring Need for Speed or Hitman's brand name. People had grown fond of Lara Croft and wanted to see her in further adventures in a new medium. Compare that to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which was graced with posters dominated by shrug-worthy characters nobody cared about.
Unsurprisingly, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider first lost its domestic box office crown amongst video game movies to Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, which could center its marketing campaign around that beloved yellow, electric rat. Since then, Hollywood has stuck to (largely) family-friendly video game adaptations rooted in games with concretely defined ensemble casts (Sonic and Pals, Mario and the Mushroom kingdom, etc). Even A Minecraft Movie, an adaptation of an online game built on farming and mining, avoided the Warcraft and Doom traps by making sure Steve was front and center in the marketing.
Whereas Doom abandoned the central concept of the game's monsters coming from Hell, Minecraft bent over backwards to showcase recognizable Minecraft figures like Creepers, Skeletons, and Villagers. The Five Nights at Freddy's films, meanwhile, have centered their entire existence on the "novelty" of seeing Freddy Fazbear and the other animatronics on the big screen. The very appearance of these critters is clearly meant to elicit cheers when they show up in a key climactic Five Nights at Freddy's 2 moment.
In more directly intertwining these video game movies with their source material, and in particular characters, audiences have immense fondness for, well, "cousin, the video game movie businsess is a-boomin'!", as Lt. Aldo Raine might say. Tweaking video game movies isn't, of course, the only element propelling this subgenre to new box office heights. Chiefly, these new features are rooted in far more popular video games (Minecraft and Mario are the two most popular games in history) than Need for Speed or Max Payne.
That's also not to say this shift in priorities has enhanced the film artistically. On the contrary, video game movies have made a lateral shift in what cynical marketing desires motivate their existence. Previously, studios tried to make money by labeling Fast & Furious and Pirates of the Caribbean pastiches Need for Speed or Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, respectively. Now they try to make money through "surprise" cameos of Fox McCloud, Shadow the Hedgehog, or figures cribbed from the most obscure corners of Five Nights at Freddy's lore. The times change. Methods shift. Capitalistic urges persist. All the while, the newest Mario movies are actually worse than the 1993 film adaptation. Fidelity to the source material isn't a virtue unto itself.
Still, recognizing what separates the video game movie hits from the flops does help illustrate why audiences are finally turning out to these films in droves. It isn't enough to just invoke a recognizable brand name. A generic crime thriller that happened to be named Spider-Man would bomb at the box office. Ditto a forgettable automobile chase film that was incidentally named The Great Gatsby. Centering these projects on characters like Yoshi, Knuckles, and Nathan Drake, though, has made 2020s video game movies feel more like direct adaptations of beloved Nintendo and PlayStation titles. That's how the video game movie space is now regularly producing $1+ billion hits...even if the quality of these movies* still can't get past the tutorial level.
* = Except for Rampage and Sonic the Hedgehog 3, those two are actually goofy fun.
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