Has the Hollywood Video Game Adaptation Become Respectable?

I remember how the first Super Mario Bros. movie was supposed to be one of the big summer movies of 1993--right along with such movies as Cliffhanger, Last Action Hero and Jurassic Park.

The reception was much more Last Action Hero than Jurassic Park. Indeed, it would seem to have fared even worse than Last Action Hero, going not just by its much-smaller gross, but how it was mostly forgotten, such that while it (probably) had its run on premium cable, I never ran into it on TV in the years afterward. Only in 2008, doing research for a piece on video game adaptations, did I try to seek it out--and as it happened, in those years when DVDs were typically packed with extras in an attempt to make them something people would choose to buy rather than just rent the one edition of that DVD I tracked down had just the movie on it. The viewing of that movie proved to me that, much as I hoped otherwise, it was no hidden gem.*

Indeed, fifteen years after its release the movie's principal legacy would seem to have been starting a tradition of poorly received adaptations of the type, with 1994's Double Dragon and Street Fighter not doing much better, etc., etc.. With 1995's Mortal Kombat the genre did seem to get its first real money-maker (there was a sequel, after all), but all the same, the growing list of commercial successes (some of which did attract a more durable following than the '93 Super Mario Bros.) did little to diminish the opprobrium.

Of course, it has since been another fifteen years--and there has been a measure of change since. The second crack at a Mortal Kombat franchise was no great commercial or critical success when it came out in 2021, but still seems to have commanded a bit more respect than the first. (Mortal Kombat 2 had a 4 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes--not a typo!--and a not much better 20 percent from audiences, in contrast with the 54 percent score from the critics and the 86 percent score from audiences the 2021 movie had.) Sonic the Hedgehog has certainly done better than that--been, in fact, rather well-received by pandemic standards (the second movie one of the top ten hits at the recovering 2022 North American box office, while garnering a 69 percent with the critics and a 96 percent with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes). And now, as the action increasingly moves to the small screen, a TV series based on The Last of Us has actually become a prestige TV-loving critical darling.

In all this it is a different world indeed.

* Interestingly about that time I found out while teaching a class in science fiction literature that at the time of release the movie won over a great many very young fans who, even after being college-aged, still had fond memories of it. All the same, none of this seems to have gone so far as to produce any evidence of a cult following.