Why video game adaptations fail and how they can be saved

Whenever a new video game adaptation is announced, you can practically hear an audible groan. Audiences and critics have long learned that pixellated characters with PlayStation plotlines tend to make for movie stinkers. Whether based on a beloved MMORPG or your favourite survival horror, the shift from hand-held controller to cinema screen usually means that all you once adored about a title is lost.

Some have even suggested there is a ‘curse’ on the genre, that video game movies are somehow doomed to fail from the moment the director shouts ‘action!’ The truth, however, is more complex.

One thing is clear: critics don't love these movies. A quick glance at Rotten Tomatoes reveals that in the last 25 years – from Super Mario Bros back in 1993 up to 2016's Warcraft from Duncan Jones – no video game adaptation has broken the 40% mark on the review aggregator site. For the best-performing examples you have the first Resident Evil film, at 34%, and frivolous Jake Gyllenhaal adventure Prince of Persia, with 36%.

Critical failures, commercial successes

But look closer. Critics may lament the low-grade plotting, dodgy dialogue and general lack of artistry (side note: it’s worth reading the late Philip French’s take down of 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider for his butter joke alone), but the paying public continue to come out for these movies.

Take the aforementioned Resident Evil. It spawned a franchise that has taken a staggering $1.23 billion worldwide, becoming the world’s highest grossing film series based on a video game. Jones' Warcraft, meanwhile, was deemed a box-office flop thanks to its pitiful $24 million takings in the US (a fraction of its $160 million budget), yet look at the worldwide figures where it produced 90% of its overall $433.5 million earnings and the picture's performance seems a lot rosier.

Then there's Pokemon: The First Movie, which began life originally as a Game Boy adventure before being transformed into a behemoth of a media franchise. While the feature-length adventures of Ash and Pikachu earned damning reviews from critics back in 1998, it was a smash with audiences, taking $163.6 million worldwide. It still sits in the top ten of highest grossing anime movies, ahead of Studio Ghibli’s beloved Princess Mononoke, released the previous year.

So from live action romps to animated adventures, these movies are not the box-office poison the so-called video game movie curse implies. Perhaps the 'c' word is more to do with the manner in which the movies are made and received? Nobody can serve two masters, but video game adaptations seem to be at the behest of several.

Super Mario Bros, gamers, and mass appeal

Part of what compels movie producers to adapt video games is that they come with a pre-existing fan base, giving you a better-than-average chance of making a return on your investment. But with that knowledge comes the fact that any adaptation needs to please those fans of the video game, to a certain extent at least. If a producer wants to make real money, however, they also need to appeal to people who have never pressed their thumb to an ‘X’ button in their life. This combination of factors often results in bland storylines, as producers and filmmakers play it safe in order to maximise profits.

Dig a little into the production history of Super Mario Bros. and you'll find that it was the financiers of the film that had the last word on the script. "The whole experience was a nightmare," co-director Rocky Morton told Wired magazine. Morton, his co-director Annabel Jankel and producer Roland Joffé had envisioned the story take place in a bleak dystopia that was the antithesis of the candy-coloured kids' game. “This wasn’t Snow White and the Seven Dinosaurs,” said Joffé. “The dinosaur world was dark and we didn’t want to hold back.”

When the movie studios executives realised this wasn't going to be a cute adventure, they stepped in at the eleventh hour insisting on script rewrites and a change of tone. “The producers decided to take onboard the comments of the studio and change the material to accommodate the comments that were coming back from the studios, which was: this was supposed to be a kids’ movie,” said Morton. “They panicked.” The results were not pretty.

This sort of story isn’t rare among video game adaptations, and when you try to please everyone, you often end up pleasing no one.

How to make a better video game movie

Perhaps video games' biggest problem is that the experiences of watching a movie and playing a game are not compatible. You're taking a medium designed for active players, and asking them to become passive audience members. For gamers, watching Michael Fassbender fly around like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat while dressed as a member of an ancient brotherhood of assassins will never be as fun as running around the rooftops of Renaissance Italy doing it yourself.

When selecting a game as source material, filmmakers should be asking what the appeal of the game will be to film audiences. Using literature as a parallel, there's a reason why books known for their use of language over plot aren’t selected by filmmakers. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but works like Ulysses will always work better as a book than a film, due to James Joyce’s literary skills rather than his plotlines. The same is true of video games. Great gameplay doesn't always convert into great screenplay.

This week sees the release of the rebooted Tomb Raider, which is based on a two-decade-old franchise that has been reinvented in recent years to strip Lara of her glamour model looks and mould her into an action heroine for the 21st century. The outlook is promising. Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander stars as the titular hero, the script has several women on board including Evan Daugherty (Snow White and the Huntsman) and is based on the rebooted game, which was written by the marvellous Rhianna Pratchett and Susan O'Connor. The film’s director, Roar Uthaug, meanwhile, has a history of making films with strong female characters with the Norwegian thriller Escape. 

Perhaps Tomb Raider will be the one to break the curse, or rather prove to be a solidly entertaining action adventure. And if not, there’s always the video game.

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Tomb Raider is released on 16 Mar