Video game adaptations have taken the small screen by storm in recent years, with the likes of Netflix’s “Castlevania” and HBO’s “The Last of Us” receiving ratings over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the latter winning the Saturn Award for Best Horror Television Series. In contrast, video games have a long and tumultuous history with the big screen, with decades of flops and misfires giving video game adaptations a bad name until fairly recently. The following are some of the more notable and notorious video-game-to-film adaptations from the past 30 years.
“Super Mario Bros.” (1993) – Dir. by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel
While not the first big screen adaptation of the Mario Brothers — an animated film released seven years prior in Japan — this was one of Hollywood’s first stabs at making a feature film adaptation of a video game. Taking a lot of liberties with the source material, this 1993 adventure flick turned a familiar romp through the Mushroom Kingdom into a Tim Burtonesque nightmare, one which did not win over any fans when it first released. Currently, Super Mario Bros sits at 29% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, the film did develop a cult following over the years, with some fans going out of their way to retrieve and edit 20 minutes of cut footage back into the runtime.
“Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” (2001) – Dir. by Hironobu Sakaguchi
Video game creators are not usually that involved in the film adaptations of their works, often opting to take a backseat with limited creative input while others take the wheel. This was not the case when Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi decided to direct “The Spirits Within,” a $100 million CGI sci-fi film with a stacked cast featuring Alec Baldwin, Ming-Na Wen, Donald Sutherland, Ving Rhames and Steve Buscemi. Despite the film’s lofty goals, “The Spirits Within” failed to make its budget back and killed Square’s new film production arm. Sakaguchi left Square not long after the film’s financial flop and formed Mistwalker, a video game development company that would go on to make Lost Odyssey and The Last Story.
“Resident Evil” (2002) – Dir. by Paul W. S. Anderson
Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise fared much better with its first feature film than Nintendo and Square’s adaptations. Set in a subterranean lab underneath Racoon City, a group of special operatives fight for their lives after a biological weapon turns most of the former staff into the walking dead. The film managed to make over $100 million dollars at the box office despite not being loved by critics at the time, and spawned five sequels featuring the film’s original protagonist, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich.
“Sonic the Hedgehog” (2020) – Dir. by Jeff Fowler
Getting the Blue Blur on the big screen was not easy. The film adaptation’s original redesign of Sonic faced heavy backlash after the first trailer dropped, which pressured the studio to make alterations and push the film back three months. The eventual “Sonic the Hedgehog” film features the titular hedgehog with better resemblance to his video game counterpart. Unlike aforementioned adaptations, the film got fairly decent reviews and managed to become one of the highest grossing films of 2020. The film was successful enough to obtain a sequel, with a threequel slated for release later this year.
