The stigma that is the Videogame curse

 It's time to put the stigma that 'all videogame adaptations are bad' to rest.

All across Hollywood there is one thing people know: 'it's a business kid'. The other thing people know is that film and tv adaptations are bad. That they always fail with critics and audiences; doesn't matter who is behind it or how many times people try. With HBO's adaptation of 'The Last of Us' and, to a lesser extent, the upcoming Illumination Super Mario Bros movie I've seen this stigma pop up again. From headlines like “break the video game adaptation curse” to “rid an awful stigma”. The show 'breaking' the video game curse is a big part of the show's marketing, completely ignoring the plethora of not just good, but amazing video game adaptations we've had in the last decade and that most adapatations have turned a profit. Not just the last decade; there is plenty of good video game adaptations even before that.

Due to this, I'm tired of this stigma. So, so tired that I hope it gets put to bed sooner rather than later. But where did this sentiment start? How is it that this stigma has stuck around? Will it ever go away?

Well, let's dive into these questions.

The 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie

First: the one that started it all. The 1993 live-action Super Mario Bros. Movie. The first big-budget Hollywood adaptation of a video game is where this narrative started. Long story short: the game was a disaster both in front of and behind the camera. While starting out promising, with Nintendo carefully choosing the studio to tackle the project and with some big names like Tom Hanks interested in the project, it slowly but steadily devolved into an unmitigated disaster.

The movie´s development, from writing the script to casting, took much longer than Nintendo and Hollywood Pictures, the studio, had anticipated. The longer this pre-development took, the more anxious they became to get a move on. It's for this reason that, while they demanded rewrites to the script that pulled in Bob Hoskins, Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo, they hired husband and wife couple Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel.

This was a mistake. They ruled with an iron fist, you could say. Rewriting the script without informing the rest of the cast and crew turned the film from a bright fantasy with heart to a cold sci-fi thriller. Disney, who purchased the distribution rights a few weeks before filming, similarly demanded rewrites. While filming the two clashed with the cast and crew constantly. Hopper stopped learning his lines since they would change anyway and Hoskins and Leguizamo started drinking to help them through the long, painful and hot days.

Upon release the movie bombed. Panned by critics and audiences alike for its plot, inconsistent tone, and unfaithfulness to the source material to the point there isn't much that makes Mario 'Mario' left. It grossed just shy of 39 million dollars at the box office against a development cost of 42 - 48 million dollars; marketing not included. This squarely puts it into the 'failure' category and resulted in Nintendo, not shying away from Hollywood and large(r) adaptations for 30 years. Until the upcoming Illumination version that is.

Mediocrity is the norm

The Mario Bros. Movie was a big stinker. What didn´t help matters is that the video game adaptations that were released afterwards weren´t smash hits either. Double Dragon, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat (don't know why they're all fighting games), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and Resident Evil were not very well-liked by critics at the time. This trend continued well into the mid-2000s with movies such as Assassin's Creed, with Michael Fassbender and Warcraft failing at becoming that hit people had been looking for.

Why have the majority of these movies been bad? I'm no expert in that department but I think it has to do with how, when you adapt them, you take the stuff away. Video games are interactive, and TV and film are passive. Stuff that works when you are controlling it doesn't have to work when you're just watching it play out. What doesn't help is that many try to have their cake and eat it too. Make it either by the numbers and/or boring for general audiences in an attempt to make it more appealing, changing so much that it's unrecognizable to the fans. Or by making the movie too similar so you end with something that's essentially just a shorter and inferior version of it.

However, what lots of people tend to forget is that these video game adaptations, while no critical darlings, weren't all strict failures. Far from it even, they were quite successful for their studios. Yes, you had some that just completely bombed like Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li and Alone in the Dark. Most though are box office successes. Mortal Kombat grossed 122.2 million dollars against a budget of 20 million. Hitman grossed 101.3 million against 24 million dollars.

Will Mairo find redemption in Hollywood? Only time will tell though I'm not a fan of Illumination's work or the choices they've made. 

See the pattern here? These movies were not all that expensive to produce so even with only lukewarm ticket sales they'd still made money for the studio. That big boom of fans coming to the theatre simply to check out the movie of that video game series they loved so much was enough in some cases to make it a worthwhile endeavour in the eyes of the studio. Even the more expensive ones of this era, like the 115 million Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, made good money with its 274.7 million haul. It's why many of them gained sequels. Resident Evil got multiple of them, even. Would they've done that if they didn't think they would turn a profit? No. No, they wouldn't have.

Plus: the general audience tended to react better to them. Still not immensely better and more enjoyable. 6's out of 10 instead of the 1-4 critics tended to give. Some movies were already pretty well-liked at release while others, like Street Fighter, have become bona fide cult classics. 

So yeah. Even in the dark days of video-game movie adaptations things weren't that dire at all. Yeah, the critics didn't like these movies and seeing something you love done dirty hurt but there weren't all the complete disasters people make them out to be.

Away from the movie space, video game adaptations were much more successful in all ways. I won't dive into them very deeply but the plethora of beloved Saturday morning cartoons and animated outings is proof in and of itself. Sonic wouldn't have gotten so many animated shows if they didn't strike a chord with kids.

The sentiment is slowly shifting

That was the situation up until a few years ago. Video game adaptations came and went semi-regularly. One popped up every few years or so, Resident Evil and its plethora of sequels amongst them, and they were mediocre at best, and terrible at worst. There was a rising trend in quality though. The 2018 Tomb Raider wasn't great but it was by all accounts a decent and enjoyable flick.

Then came the double punch of Detective Pikachu and the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. A live-action Pokémon movie is something people have mused about ever since the animated one. Nintendo and Warner Bros. picked Detective Pikachu as its basis, a spin-off titled that focused on a talking, coffee-addicted Pikachu solving crimes was an odd one. Yet, it worked. By not adapting the standard Pokémon story, a young trainer trying to be the very best like no one ever was, but simply a story set in the world of Pokémon it avoided a common problem these films suffered from. Basically just retells the story of the game(s) but in a less interesting way. It's the big issue with the 2018 Tomb Raider movie. It's just a retelling of the 2013 game but, shorter and less interesting because of all the changes it made. Removing the mystique of the 'is it all mystical?', removing characters, glossing over major moments and character development etc.

The Sonic movie had quite a false start. The trailer has gone into infamy because of how bad it was. The terrible, absolutely ugly Sonic design and a trailer that felt completely tone-deaf. Luckily for everybody involved, Paramount Pictures actually listened to the feedback. They delayed the movie to redo Sonic, you know, the thing you'll be looking at for 80% of the movie. When it was released, it was surprisingly good. A good time for the family, with a different but still compelling interpretation of the blue blur and Jim Carrey, was at the top of his game as Dr Robotnik.

Both did well; they got good critics and audience scores and made quite a bit of profit. Sonic even got a sequel that did even better than the first. This, coupled with some stellar video game shows like League of Legends: Arkane, Castlevania, Cyberpunk and now The Last of Us has started to shift the sentiment. Enough that people, like myself, have gotten quite annoyed with people's persistence on the matter.

From the marketing folks, I understand them keep playing up the video game curse. They're playing into it to make the show look even better, even more, unmissable than it already is. Why does the general movie-going audience still think all video game movies are bad? Ignorance, mostly. They're not familiar with the gaming world and don't know any better than the reputation of all those bad movies. Which, to be fair, are quite a lot. The more 'good', high-profile, adaptations come out the more this sentiment will hopefully shift, until, it's not a thing anymore. Perhaps the Illumination Super Mario Bros. movie will help with that when it releases next month.