Video Game Movies Become Blockbusters

A month ago I suggested that the opprobrium that once attached to major Hollywood features adapted from video games was fading away. None can be expected to take a non-technical Oscar home soon, but the kind of sneering we used to see is just not part of the scene anymore.

Still, such movies, if sometimes money-makers ever since Hollywood started cranking them out (otherwise there would not have been so many of them), were never really first-rank hits--not even an Angelina Jolie-vintage Lara Croft or Prince of Persia movie--while if the Resident Evil franchise ran for six films the movies were made on a smaller scale, while I might add, relying very heavily indeed on its popularity in the United States. (In 2017 Resident Evil: The Final Chapter made just $27 million in North America--but $36 million in Japan and $160 million in China, those two countries accounting for two-thirds of its global gross in a significant departure from the norm for English-language productions.)

This has changed with The Super Mario Bros. Movie and its $1 billion gross--which all but guarantees that Hollywood will be looking at more such projects, and ready to plow more money into them, the more in as the increasingly aged and weary collection of franchises that have been the mainstay of its release schedules are failing badly with moviegoers, and there seems less and less room for doubt about "superhero fatigue."

This raises the question of what the studios will make of those other adaptations--the more in as Hollywood executives so consistently fail to understand what "works" when a movie hits. When James Bond exploded in the '60s they thought "spies." When Star Wars exploded in the '70s, they thought "space." They were very, very slow to get that rather than "spies" or "space" what mattered was the invention of the action film as we know it, and the "high concept" film more broadly, precisely because grasping this meant understanding craft, aesthetics and the mind of the audience, rather than the kind of uncomprehending simian imitation to which they inclined.

So is it likely to go with those adaptations. It seems to me that The Super Mario Bros. Movie has been the success that it has because instead of vaguely turning the stuff of a video game into a movie they made a movie faithful to what a vast audience loved in the games--and had no pretensions to being anything but the makers of a crowd-pleasing film (which, incidentally, probably could not have worked nearly so well had they attempted to make it as a live-action film).

If Hollywood gets this aspect of the film's success I will be very surprised indeed--and instead expect to see lots and lots of adaptations made by people who just didn't "get it," which flop and leave the studio executives stupidly baffled about why moviegoers refused their offerings.