> I strongly believe that video games have a higher ceiling for storytelling quality. There are several reasons underlying my newfound evangelism: a larger built-in audience, a more robust market with hundreds of games appealing to many different types of fans, and, most importantly, demographic variability.
So none of the things listed here are clearly related to "storytelling quality" -- those are marketing advantages.
I think the real questions for _quality_ for comics vs games are things like:
- do games, which force players to explore and interact, forcing better world-building by front-loading some consideration of internal logic and mechanics?
- do games, which put players more directly in the perspective of characters, at the level of having to choose actions, force writers to create more compelling dilemmas?
- do comics, which have to give consideration to static visual images, make for better posters than films?
- do comics, which world-build over long sequences, make for stories that feel too compressed in films?
Western game studios are failing, look at Ubisoft, Bungie, and a dozen Xbox studios, most of which are collapsing due to a sheer lack of creativity. How Hollywood, which is going through its own dark patch, expects to find creative inspiration in a dying (western) video game medium is beyond me.
Are there _any_ good video game movies whatsoever? The 2005 Doom film was the easiest miss I'd ever seen. All they needed to do was remake Aliens, but with Doom. Instead of ending up in the Alien nest, you end up in hell. No idea how they managed to drop the ball on that one.
The third Sonic the Hedgehog was hilarious: Jim Carrey really made the movie.
The movies stand by themselves; they take characters from the games and make movies around them.
My one issue is that they didn't involve much of the iconic soundtrack game soundtrack in the movie, which Super Mario Brothers fixed. I really wanted Sonic the Hedgehog to start with "Saaaaayyy-Gaaa" and then fade into the iconic intro music with a modern version of the hedgehog waving his finger at me.
I recently saw "Exit 8" and I found it pretty intriguing. However, it's free adaptation of an experimental indie game. Funnily enough, I didn't even know that the movie was based on game. I was very surprised when I found out.
Some of the best selling movies in the past couple of years were video game ones: Mario, Minecraft, Mario Galaxy were all huge. All close to or over a billion dollars at the box office. The Sonic films were popular, and Detective Pikachu was decent.
The new Mortal Kombat ones did pretty well, but I prefer the original.
Honestly, video game films have been outperforming super heroes for the past several years, though Spider-Man turned that around.
Most have been horrible or horribly mediocre. Financial success doesn't necessarily mean something is good either. Also, some of these are more like: "very loosely based on the video game, so much so that you have to squint very hard to see it." Stuff like Detective Pikachu, or Minecraft are just aesthetics and have little to do with the actual games.
Jun. 10, 2016 Warcraft Film
Dec. 21, 2016 Assassin's Creed Film
Jan. 27, 2017
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
Film
Mar. 16, 2018 Tomb Raider Film
Apr. 13, 2018 Rampage Film
May 10, 2019 Pokémon Detective Pikachu Film
Feb. 14, 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog Film
Dec. 4, 2020
Monster Hunter
Film
Apr. 23, 2021 Mortal Kombat Film
Jun. 25, 2021 Werewolves Within Film
Feb. 18, 2022 Uncharted Film
Feb. 24, 2022 Halo TV series
Apr. 5, 2023
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Film
Apr. 8, 2022 Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Film
Jul. 14, 2022 Resident Evil TV series
Jan. 15, 2023 The Last of Us TV series
Jul. 27, 2023 Twisted Metal TV series
Aug. 25, 2023 Gran Turismo Film
Oct. 27, 2023 Five Nights at Freddy's Film
Apr. 5, 2024 Knuckles TV series
Apr. 10, 2024 Fallout TV series
Aug. 9, 2024 Borderlands Film
Dec. 20, 2024 Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Film
Apr. 4, 2025 A Minecraft Movie Film
Apr. 25, 2025 Until Dawn Film
Dec. 5, 2025 Five Nights at Freddy's 2 Film
Jan. 23, 2026 Return to Silent Hill Film
Jan. 30, 2026 Iron Lung Film
May 8, 2026 Mortal Kombat II Film
PS: Note the question being asked is "Will it be any good?" Not "Will it be profitable?"
Yeah, most of the list is pretty dismal, but there are some bright spots. Sonic movies. Fallout, Last of Us (and don’t forget Cyberpunk: Edgerunners) for TV.
The original Castlevania animated show was good, shame about the Warren Ellis situation. Would have loved to see him write Nocturne as well (which was fun but just had a much weaker script).
The Sonic movies are really well done. The last two Mortal Kombat's were pretty good- particularly the second one which is more true to the game after the setup in the first one. The first Mario movie was enjoyable but forgettable.
There are decent ones as of late. The key revolves around not trying to tell a video game story in a different medium. Mario's movies, for instance, aren't trying to recreate mario 1 or whatnot and are just telling a story around the environments and motifs of Mario.
Not a Movie, but Arcane (from League of Legends) seems to be the peak example of a video game adaptation. Take the universe of an IP and tell a separate slice of a story within that universe, in a way where fixed pacing and cinematography can flex its strengths.
The Last of Us [0], Fallout [1], Wreak It Ralph [2], Pokémon Detective Pikachu [3], Sonic the Hedgehog 3 [4], Sonic the Hedgehog 2 [5], Sonic the Hedgehog [6], Mortal Kombat 2 [7], Gran Turismo [8], etc.
Cynical content from the 90s and 2000s that lack "heart" like Quake, Doom, and the like are difficult to tie a cohesive story with because there was no story or plot underlying those IPs.
These had a lot of blood sweat and tears poured into them.
Most Hollywood game adaptations are the same as the Disney live actions. They have their hands on an IP, they want to flip it into easy money. Those turn out excruciatingly bad, because for an easy flip, you need to target for mass appeal, which waters down the material.
> These had a lot of blood sweat and tears poured into them
It goes both ways. Both the video game and the film/tv IP need to have some sort of deeper meaning and writing. You just can't write a cohesive story for a cynical multiplayer FPS like Quake, Wolfenstein II, Doom, etc whose whole appeal in the 1990s and 2000s was gore and shock value.
There's a reason people my age (below 35) have never played and oftentimes haven't even heard of Quake or Doom or Wolfenstein but have heard of Fallout or Half Life.
> Most Hollywood game adaptations are the same as the Disney live actions. They have their hands on an IP, they want to flip it into easy money...
I've given a list of the majority of video game movies created this past decade. They made bank and were well written and have mass appeal.
TFA starts with a picture of Last of Us. Season 1 was amazing for the most part. Even my spouse who has zero interest in video games loved it.
And then season 2 started. They forgot their core audience (gamers, horror, fans of post-apocalyptic themes) and tried to make it a soap opera that appeals to everyone. At one point the main character spent 5 minutes sitting on a couch talking with a therapist. It was more slick, less gritty ... the cast was wearing brand-new jackets and backpacks and boots, 20 years after the mushroom zombie apocalypse. What a disappointment.
Yet that's pretty typical for Hollywood suits. They want to expand the audience or chase some trend, push the creatives out of the way, and end up ruining it.
I'm going to defense s2. season 2 was ok. it followed the 2nd game pretty closely. The problem was the age gap, and the cast just didnt match that jump, and I understand why. Ellie just looked too young.
Not a chance. Only the movies geared towards kids have been any good like Mario, Sonic, Wreck it Ralf, and the Lego movies. All of the teen/adult movies have been mediocre at best with maybe Resident Evil 1 being an exception.
Much of Fallout's success is also because Bethesda also puts effort into worldbuilding and supporting a community.
Contemporary boomer game franchises like Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, etc just don't have "heart". They were games that were created as technical demonstrators but with no care or input for story writing aside from being edgy for the sake of being edgy, and as a result were unable to age well.
Meanwhile, Fallout and Half Life are both products of the same era that were also technically demanding (especially Half Life) yet they have actually been able to stand the test of time.
The problem is that Hollywood writers are extremely arrogant and refuse to simply adapt the videogame script that millions of people love. They have to prove that they are better- after all despite being a huge industry they still look down on the gaming industry.
So usually you end up with a piece of shit that nobody likes.
"I strongly believe that video games have a higher ceiling for storytelling quality. There are several reasons underlying my newfound evangelism: a larger built-in audience, a more robust market with hundreds of games appealing to many different types of fans, and, most importantly, demographic variability"
-------------
These are reasons to invest in video game adaptations that do not necessarily lead to high quality storytelling.
Hollywood has long looked to video game audiences as an untapped market that they desperately wanted to break into. Who doesn't want a huge, built-in audience for their new movie? The problem was that most video games used to have fairly simple stories and settings. e.g. Pacman. It's a circle with a mouth that runs from ghosts and eats dots. That's it. Somehow, that very basic concept has been expanded to multiple animated TV series and, amazingly, some live action appearances.
Then video games started trying to incorporate cinematic story telling. e.g. Ninja Gaiden took a standard side-scrolling platformer and gave it cut-scenes that told a story. It was basic and low budget at first. Video games used to cost a fraction of what a movies did to make. Early attempts at storytelling in video games were often basic and, frankly, not very good. They real meat and potatoes has always been the gameplay. Even today, a game with a good story but bad gameplay is unlikely to succeed.
Over time, games became bigger and bigger productions. "Silliwood" arrived in the late 90's, when bankable actors like Mark Hamill portrayed video game characters for live action cut-scenes. In this era, video games were a lot like TV during the golden age of film. They were viewed as being mostly for actors who couldn't find "real" jobs. The respect wasn't there. Video games may have ditched live action video for the most part, but the role of actors has simply become more and more essential. So too have plots and universe building really taken off. Modern video games can still be as shallow as Pac Man, but they can also have deep and compelling story lines set in universes that are incredibly detailed. Video game budgets have eclipsed and surpassed movies, and they often build worlds that players spend hundreds or even thousands of hours in. And yet, until fairly recently there were remarkably few successful adaptations of video games in film and TV.
That has changed, perhaps mostly because television has embraced long-form storytelling. There are still people trying to make films out of popular video games that have little or no original story, and these are generally as bad as ever. e.g. I'll definitely take a pass on "Fortnite: The Movie". Trying to make a two hour film out of a video game that takes dozens of hours to cover just its early chapters is also unlikely to be successful. What we're now seeing is TV shows like Fallout making the larger time commitment necessary to really bring huge and detailed game worlds to life. They're succeeding, not just because of the built-in audience, but because the results of adapting such rich and detailed worlds is compelling.
What I see going on now is more akin to the interplay between Chanbara and Westerns in the early 20th century. Chanbara learned a lot from Westerns. Kurosawa was heavily influenced by Ford. Then the influence went the other way, and back and forth. Both genres fed off each other and became better. I think that's what we're seeing now with video games and film. It's not just marketing and audience size. Both genres have something to give to the other.
They're not going to drive much "I went to see this movie because I loved the video games" traffic, but I've always thought the Gabriel Knight games could be great IP for a movie series.
> I strongly believe that video games have a higher ceiling for storytelling quality. There are several reasons underlying my newfound evangelism: a larger built-in audience, a more robust market with hundreds of games appealing to many different types of fans, and, most importantly, demographic variability.
So none of the things listed here are clearly related to "storytelling quality" -- those are marketing advantages.
I think the real questions for _quality_ for comics vs games are things like:
- do games, which force players to explore and interact, forcing better world-building by front-loading some consideration of internal logic and mechanics?
- do games, which put players more directly in the perspective of characters, at the level of having to choose actions, force writers to create more compelling dilemmas?
- do comics, which have to give consideration to static visual images, make for better posters than films?
- do comics, which world-build over long sequences, make for stories that feel too compressed in films?
Western game studios are failing, look at Ubisoft, Bungie, and a dozen Xbox studios, most of which are collapsing due to a sheer lack of creativity. How Hollywood, which is going through its own dark patch, expects to find creative inspiration in a dying (western) video game medium is beyond me.
Are there _any_ good video game movies whatsoever? The 2005 Doom film was the easiest miss I'd ever seen. All they needed to do was remake Aliens, but with Doom. Instead of ending up in the Alien nest, you end up in hell. No idea how they managed to drop the ball on that one.
The third Sonic the Hedgehog was hilarious: Jim Carrey really made the movie.
The movies stand by themselves; they take characters from the games and make movies around them.
My one issue is that they didn't involve much of the iconic soundtrack game soundtrack in the movie, which Super Mario Brothers fixed. I really wanted Sonic the Hedgehog to start with "Saaaaayyy-Gaaa" and then fade into the iconic intro music with a modern version of the hedgehog waving his finger at me.
I saw Sonic 2 and 3 at a dollar theater this summer with my kid. Both were shockingly entertaining.
I recently saw "Exit 8" and I found it pretty intriguing. However, it's free adaptation of an experimental indie game. Funnily enough, I didn't even know that the movie was based on game. I was very surprised when I found out.
Some of the best selling movies in the past couple of years were video game ones: Mario, Minecraft, Mario Galaxy were all huge. All close to or over a billion dollars at the box office. The Sonic films were popular, and Detective Pikachu was decent.
The new Mortal Kombat ones did pretty well, but I prefer the original.
Honestly, video game films have been outperforming super heroes for the past several years, though Spider-Man turned that around.
and I expect the upcoming Resident Evil film to be good with Zach Cregger (Weapons, Barbarian) writing+directing
Most have been horrible or horribly mediocre. Financial success doesn't necessarily mean something is good either. Also, some of these are more like: "very loosely based on the video game, so much so that you have to squint very hard to see it." Stuff like Detective Pikachu, or Minecraft are just aesthetics and have little to do with the actual games.
Jun. 10, 2016 Warcraft Film
Dec. 21, 2016 Assassin's Creed Film
Jan. 27, 2017 Resident Evil: The Final Chapter Film
Mar. 16, 2018 Tomb Raider Film
Apr. 13, 2018 Rampage Film
May 10, 2019 Pokémon Detective Pikachu Film
Feb. 14, 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog Film
Dec. 4, 2020 Monster Hunter Film
Apr. 23, 2021 Mortal Kombat Film
Jun. 25, 2021 Werewolves Within Film
Feb. 18, 2022 Uncharted Film
Feb. 24, 2022 Halo TV series
Apr. 5, 2023 The Super Mario Bros. Movie Film
Apr. 8, 2022 Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Film
Jul. 14, 2022 Resident Evil TV series
Jan. 15, 2023 The Last of Us TV series
Jul. 27, 2023 Twisted Metal TV series
Aug. 25, 2023 Gran Turismo Film
Oct. 27, 2023 Five Nights at Freddy's Film
Apr. 5, 2024 Knuckles TV series
Apr. 10, 2024 Fallout TV series
Aug. 9, 2024 Borderlands Film
Dec. 20, 2024 Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Film
Apr. 4, 2025 A Minecraft Movie Film
Apr. 25, 2025 Until Dawn Film
Dec. 5, 2025 Five Nights at Freddy's 2 Film
Jan. 23, 2026 Return to Silent Hill Film
Jan. 30, 2026 Iron Lung Film
May 8, 2026 Mortal Kombat II Film
PS: Note the question being asked is "Will it be any good?" Not "Will it be profitable?"
Yeah, most of the list is pretty dismal, but there are some bright spots. Sonic movies. Fallout, Last of Us (and don’t forget Cyberpunk: Edgerunners) for TV.
Castlevania deserves a spot on the list.
The original Castlevania animated show was good, shame about the Warren Ellis situation. Would have loved to see him write Nocturne as well (which was fun but just had a much weaker script).
I'll defend Uwe Boll's Postal movie. It's on par with the source material at least.
And IIRC Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge was a fun time.
My kids enjoyed the Minecraft movie, and it was a commercial success.
The Sonic movies are really well done. The last two Mortal Kombat's were pretty good- particularly the second one which is more true to the game after the setup in the first one. The first Mario movie was enjoyable but forgettable.
There are decent ones as of late. The key revolves around not trying to tell a video game story in a different medium. Mario's movies, for instance, aren't trying to recreate mario 1 or whatnot and are just telling a story around the environments and motifs of Mario.
Not a Movie, but Arcane (from League of Legends) seems to be the peak example of a video game adaptation. Take the universe of an IP and tell a separate slice of a story within that universe, in a way where fixed pacing and cinematography can flex its strengths.
I loved the Pokemon movies when I was kid.
Are they good?
Who cares?
What matters is if people enjoy them.
Those are not "Hollywood movies" but Detective Pikachu might count.
I saw one Pokemon movie and even as a child I found it lazy and disappointing. That's quite a feat...
Last Mortal Kombat. First Mortal Kombat - from 1996 or so. Cyberpunk Edgerunners.
The Last of Us [0], Fallout [1], Wreak It Ralph [2], Pokémon Detective Pikachu [3], Sonic the Hedgehog 3 [4], Sonic the Hedgehog 2 [5], Sonic the Hedgehog [6], Mortal Kombat 2 [7], Gran Turismo [8], etc.
Cynical content from the 90s and 2000s that lack "heart" like Quake, Doom, and the like are difficult to tie a cohesive story with because there was no story or plot underlying those IPs.
[0] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_last_of_us
[1] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/fallout
[2] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wreck_it_ralph
[3] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pokemon_detective_pikachu
[4] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sonic_the_hedgehog_3
[5] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sonic_the_hedgehog_2
[6] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sonic_the_hedgehog_2020
[7] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mortal_kombat_ii
[8] - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gran_turismo_based_on_a_tru...
These had a lot of blood sweat and tears poured into them.
Most Hollywood game adaptations are the same as the Disney live actions. They have their hands on an IP, they want to flip it into easy money. Those turn out excruciatingly bad, because for an easy flip, you need to target for mass appeal, which waters down the material.
> These had a lot of blood sweat and tears poured into them
It goes both ways. Both the video game and the film/tv IP need to have some sort of deeper meaning and writing. You just can't write a cohesive story for a cynical multiplayer FPS like Quake, Wolfenstein II, Doom, etc whose whole appeal in the 1990s and 2000s was gore and shock value.
There's a reason people my age (below 35) have never played and oftentimes haven't even heard of Quake or Doom or Wolfenstein but have heard of Fallout or Half Life.
> Most Hollywood game adaptations are the same as the Disney live actions. They have their hands on an IP, they want to flip it into easy money...
I've given a list of the majority of video game movies created this past decade. They made bank and were well written and have mass appeal.
>You just can't write a cohesive story for a cynical multiplayer FPS like Quake, Wolfenstein II, Doom
Except you CAN! Doom and Quake films are begging to just be reskinned Aliens. Begging! I have no idea why someone doesn't just make this film.
But you could just watch Aliens.
> Except you CAN! Doom and Quake films are begging to just be reskinned Aliens
That's my point. The fact that you need to pitch these kinds of games as a knockoff of a better movie shows why they simply aren't viable IP.
Nerdy boomer nostalgia ain't cutting it for IP whose entire value was derived from being edgy and shock+gore driven.
TFA starts with a picture of Last of Us. Season 1 was amazing for the most part. Even my spouse who has zero interest in video games loved it.
And then season 2 started. They forgot their core audience (gamers, horror, fans of post-apocalyptic themes) and tried to make it a soap opera that appeals to everyone. At one point the main character spent 5 minutes sitting on a couch talking with a therapist. It was more slick, less gritty ... the cast was wearing brand-new jackets and backpacks and boots, 20 years after the mushroom zombie apocalypse. What a disappointment.
Yet that's pretty typical for Hollywood suits. They want to expand the audience or chase some trend, push the creatives out of the way, and end up ruining it.
Season 1 was one of my favorite TV shows ever. Season 2 was terrible, I'm not sure I even finished it.
I'm going to defense s2. season 2 was ok. it followed the 2nd game pretty closely. The problem was the age gap, and the cast just didnt match that jump, and I understand why. Ellie just looked too young.
Not a chance. Only the movies geared towards kids have been any good like Mario, Sonic, Wreck it Ralf, and the Lego movies. All of the teen/adult movies have been mediocre at best with maybe Resident Evil 1 being an exception.
No, and neither will be the anime Hollywood adaptions which are ramping up.
For every one good movie or show you get ten bad ones.
> For every one good movie or show you get ten bad ones.
Executive: So what you're telling me is I only need to make 11 movies to per hit.
If only. Accepting failure likely wouldn't have resulted in so many mediocre movies.
Huge losses on movies are rare I think, but being risk averse comes at a cost.
That's just sturgeon's law. You can argue that for anything whatsoever, regardless of source material.
Fallout I would say is the benchmark to beat for video game adaption to screen.
Much easier to make a kids movie based on a franchise like Mario than a more complex game like Fallout.
For those who haven’t seen it, recommended
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12637874/
Okey Dokey
---
Much of Fallout's success is also because Bethesda also puts effort into worldbuilding and supporting a community.
Contemporary boomer game franchises like Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, etc just don't have "heart". They were games that were created as technical demonstrators but with no care or input for story writing aside from being edgy for the sake of being edgy, and as a result were unable to age well.
Meanwhile, Fallout and Half Life are both products of the same era that were also technically demanding (especially Half Life) yet they have actually been able to stand the test of time.
It sounds like you haven't touched (or heard of?) any of the recent DOOM games.
Ok, I’m a casual occasional gamer so don’t know the background to these things
The problem is that Hollywood writers are extremely arrogant and refuse to simply adapt the videogame script that millions of people love. They have to prove that they are better- after all despite being a huge industry they still look down on the gaming industry.
So usually you end up with a piece of shit that nobody likes.
"I strongly believe that video games have a higher ceiling for storytelling quality. There are several reasons underlying my newfound evangelism: a larger built-in audience, a more robust market with hundreds of games appealing to many different types of fans, and, most importantly, demographic variability"
-------------
These are reasons to invest in video game adaptations that do not necessarily lead to high quality storytelling.
Hollywood has long looked to video game audiences as an untapped market that they desperately wanted to break into. Who doesn't want a huge, built-in audience for their new movie? The problem was that most video games used to have fairly simple stories and settings. e.g. Pacman. It's a circle with a mouth that runs from ghosts and eats dots. That's it. Somehow, that very basic concept has been expanded to multiple animated TV series and, amazingly, some live action appearances.
Then video games started trying to incorporate cinematic story telling. e.g. Ninja Gaiden took a standard side-scrolling platformer and gave it cut-scenes that told a story. It was basic and low budget at first. Video games used to cost a fraction of what a movies did to make. Early attempts at storytelling in video games were often basic and, frankly, not very good. They real meat and potatoes has always been the gameplay. Even today, a game with a good story but bad gameplay is unlikely to succeed.
Over time, games became bigger and bigger productions. "Silliwood" arrived in the late 90's, when bankable actors like Mark Hamill portrayed video game characters for live action cut-scenes. In this era, video games were a lot like TV during the golden age of film. They were viewed as being mostly for actors who couldn't find "real" jobs. The respect wasn't there. Video games may have ditched live action video for the most part, but the role of actors has simply become more and more essential. So too have plots and universe building really taken off. Modern video games can still be as shallow as Pac Man, but they can also have deep and compelling story lines set in universes that are incredibly detailed. Video game budgets have eclipsed and surpassed movies, and they often build worlds that players spend hundreds or even thousands of hours in. And yet, until fairly recently there were remarkably few successful adaptations of video games in film and TV.
That has changed, perhaps mostly because television has embraced long-form storytelling. There are still people trying to make films out of popular video games that have little or no original story, and these are generally as bad as ever. e.g. I'll definitely take a pass on "Fortnite: The Movie". Trying to make a two hour film out of a video game that takes dozens of hours to cover just its early chapters is also unlikely to be successful. What we're now seeing is TV shows like Fallout making the larger time commitment necessary to really bring huge and detailed game worlds to life. They're succeeding, not just because of the built-in audience, but because the results of adapting such rich and detailed worlds is compelling.
What I see going on now is more akin to the interplay between Chanbara and Westerns in the early 20th century. Chanbara learned a lot from Westerns. Kurosawa was heavily influenced by Ford. Then the influence went the other way, and back and forth. Both genres fed off each other and became better. I think that's what we're seeing now with video games and film. It's not just marketing and audience size. Both genres have something to give to the other.
They're not going to drive much "I went to see this movie because I loved the video games" traffic, but I've always thought the Gabriel Knight games could be great IP for a movie series.
Or even better, a TV-show.
Yup, would love an apple tv production of Gabriel Knight...
[dead]