Warner Bros has landed an unexpectedly huge hit with A Minecraft Movie. But then, videogame adaptations have long attracted sizeable audiences…
What was the first ever live-action movie based on a videogame? The popular thinking is that it was 1993’s Super Mario Bros. In reality, it was Mirai Ninja – known in the US as Cyber Ninja – a big-screen rendering of an obscure Namco arcade game released in 1988. A full five years before Hollywood’s Mario adaptation, it featured a striking mix of katana-swinging action and giant Heian period-themed robots, yet largely drifted by unnoticed. Criminal, really. (Good news, though: it’s on archive.org if you want to watch it.)
Super Mario Bros, thanks to the recognisability of its name and the huge marketing campaign surrounding it, soon became infamous for its distinctly loose handling of Nintendo’s bouncy fairytale videogame franchise. Its critical and financial failure set something of a tone for the game-to-film adaptations that followed: the prevailing attitude being that such movies are hurriedly-made, creatively bankrupt, and exist only to attract a group of younger cinema-goers familiar with such names as Street Fighter, Resident Evil or Tomb Raider.
More recently, though, the financial success of the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise, and the critical acclaim of HBO’s The Last Of Us on TV, have led to suggestions that the ‘videogame adaptation curse’ as it’s long been known, has finally been broken. It’s arguable, however, that such a curse never truly existed in the first place.
Looking back through the history of game-to-film adaptations, a loose pattern emerges. On one hand, there were movies like Super Marios Bros and Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time (2010), which enjoyed lavish budgets and A-list casts. More commonly, however, videogame adaptations were treated like B-movies, with resources and production values to match; 1994’s Double Dragon looked like any other straight-to-video martial arts movie of its era, and the less said about Uwe Boll’s string of adaptations (Postal, Far Cry, etc, etc) the better.
What’s notable, though, is that while critics have often disparaged videogame movies, even some of the panned ones fared well financially. It was easy to titter at the dodgy wigs and cardboard acting in 1994’s Street Fighter, but its $99m global box office was more than three times its budget. Its cult status also meant that it would have made millions more in VHS and DVD sales.
Director Paul WS Anderson’s Mortal Kombat (1995) was an even bigger hit relative to its outlay, making over $120m on a $20m investment. Resident Evil (2002), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2003), Warcraft (2016) and Rampage (2018) all turned a profit, irrespective of reviews or studio expectations. One surprising example was 2014’s Need For Speed; it made $203m on a $66m budget, which at the time was considered disappointing. These days, a multiplier like that would probably be chalked up as a victory.
Read more: Splatterhouse | The pioneering horror videogame’s surprising movie connections
This isn’t to say there haven’t been some major misfires along the way. Doom, released in 2005, failed to earn its $60m+ budget back, despite the presence of an early film career Dwayne Johnson among its cast; similarly, martial arts flick Tekken sank without trace in 2009. Wing Commander, released in 1999, was a vanishingly rare example of a videogame designer directing his own movie adaptation; the resulting film was both panned and failed to make back its $20m budget back. It’s proof, perhaps, that videogame movies don’t necessarily fail because they aren’t sufficiently respectful to their source material.
Those misfires aside, though, and it’s clear that there’s long been an audience for movies based on games – and that people will buy tickets for them even if the reviews are damning. The Resident Evil franchise, for example, proved reliably profit-making enough to spawn a total of six movies under the creative aegis of Paul WS Anderson.
In Japan, animated films based on games have also found an appreciative audience. Street Fighter II was a hit in 1994; the thoroughly charming Animal Crossing was popular in 2006, and it’s a little baffling that Nintendo never translated it for release overseas. More recently, the 3D animated fantasy Dragon Quest: Your Story made $13m in Japanese cinemas in 2019. Towering over them all, though, was 1998’s Pokemon: The First Movie; made for $5m, it brought in $172m at the global box office and made millions more on its home release.
In the past six years, videogame movies have continued to provide solid returns for studios back over in Hollywood. Detective Pikachu and Uncharted made over $400m each; the aforementioned Sonic The Hedgehog franchise has grown its audience with each sequel; Five Nights At Freddy’s was a teen-friendly horror hit for Blumhouse. The exception to this was Borderlands, though that may have been because its makers seemed more intent on putting together a Guardians Of The Galaxy clone than a film that captured the febrile tone of the games.
The huge numbers of A Minecraft Movie enjoyed over the weekend suggest that there’s a sizable and appreciative audience for an adventure-comedy with a big name attached to it. It didn’t go over at all well with critics, and even the first trailer drew a derisive response on YouTube. The film itself is clearly a crowd-pleaser, though; there have been reports of loud cheers when Jack Black says, “I am Steve,” while TikTok videos have shown cinemas full of kids clapping and cheering.
What’s particularly telling about these latest successes is that there’s money to be made from movies that skew towards a younger audience. The gore and violence of the Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil adaptations immediately made them the preserve of older teenagers at the absolute youngest. Directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, in adapting Super Mario Bros, unaccountably took their film down a dystopian rabbit hole of leather fetish gear; it took 30 years before animation studio Illumination made 2023’s The Super Mario Bros Movie, which more accurately reflected the whimsy of the videogames and made $1.3bn worldwide.
Amid a shaky year for cinemas, A Minecraft Movie arrived in time for the Easter summer holidays and looks likely to cross the billion dollar threshold over the next few weeks. Its numbers are already making Disney/Marvel’s efforts with this year’s Captain America: Brave New World and Snow White look faintly embarrassing.
By now, videogame movies have shaken off some of the stigma once attached to them in the 1990s and 2000s; director Zach Cregger, having scored a hit with his original horror film Barbarian, is currently off making an entry in the Resident Evil franchise. Meanwhile, director Christophe Gans is making another Silent Hill movie, the full-blooded Mortal Kombat series is getting another film from director Simon McQuaid, and David F Sandberg (Shazam!) is adapting the slasher horror game, Until Dawn.
It’s the more kid-friendly videogame movies that could prove to be the next box office sensations, however. Sonic The Hedgehog 4, due out in 2027, will more than likely continue the same run of fortune. That same year, director Wes Ball will unveil his take on The Legend Of Zelda – a film that could enjoy similar numbers to The Super Mario Bros Movie if it’s pitched right. Meanwhile, there’s a whole generation of newer videogame franchises that, in light of A Minecraft Movie’s blockbuster status, will likely be fast-tracked into production over the coming years. Further Minecraft films are a certainty, but there are a legion of other games that have a huge following among younger players.
You may not have heard of the likes of Fortnite, Roblox or Among Us, but you could see their posters hanging in a cinema foyer near you soon…
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