Movies Based on Video Games

A rundown on a sub-genre full of missteps

BY EMIL TIEDEMANN

Game-makers have always jumped at any chance they could to borrow from almost any idea and transform it into an arcade game, but they concentrated on what was going down at the box office more than almost anything else, adapting the latest blockbuster into the latest Nintendo or Sega adventure. But every now and then wires would get crossed and filmmakers would turn the tables, daring to convert a popular game into a big-screen adaptation. This phenom, though, was anything but...as it turns out, video games simply don't make good movies! Let's face it, Donkey Kong and Sonic the Hedgehog just can't cut it in the form of live action motion pictures, but that hasn't stopped film execs from introducing other beloved console characters to movie theatres over the years.

It was just 16 years ago, in 1993, when Hollywood Pictures launched Super Mario Bros., the first-ever live action motion picture based on a video game. The producers of the movie adopted a darker tone for the feature, which ended up as one of the year's biggest flops, despite a $42 million budget and big-name stars like Dennis Hopper (as King Koopa), Bob Hoskins (Mario) and John Leguizamo (Luigi). It seemed impossible to alter a live action script from such an eccentric fairytale that was the Mario Bros., yet this exploit failed to concern the embarrassed studio from giving it the go-ahead anyways. In the end, Super Mario Bros. earned back just under $21 million in domestic ticket sales, though scathed egos were the hardest to bounce back from.

You'd think La La Land would've learned its lesson with the disaster that was Super Mario Bros., but a year later, during 1994, another celebrated video game extended its franchise via a live action movie. Director James Yukich warranted no favours for the Double Dragon series when he took on the independent film production of the same name, which starred Scott Wolf, Mark Dacascos and Alyssa Milano. Set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Double Dragon dragged an already thin plot into a 95-minute blunder that was shunned by gamers and moviegoers alike, resulting in a disgraceful $2.3 million theatrical run.

Screenwriter-director Steven E. de Souza (Die Hard) strayed far off from the plotline of Capcom's now-legendary fighting game series Street Fighter, but something tells me that even if he had followed the story to a tee, the $35 million feature film never had a chance in hell to dignify its origins. Having international movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme attached (as Guile) perhaps saved Street Fighter from dipping into the red (it earned $95 million worldwide), but critics tore the film apart anyways, panning it as one of 1994's worst offerings. Street Fighter also starred Aussie pop singer Kylie Minogue (as Cammy) and was the final effort for Puerto Rican film and TV legend Raul Julia (as M. Bison), who died two months before the film hit theatres, after suffering a stroke and falling into a coma.

New Line Cinema finally got things right...sorta...with the next live action video game adaptation, Mortal Kombat, casting a group of unknowns and launching a tie-in animated direct-to-video film several months before the big one hit theatres. Although critics refused to support this film either, fanboys tallied up some impressive box office numbers, as Mortal Kombat grossed $122 million internationally as the most profitable--to this point--in the still-fresh genre. Much of the character cast were back two years later, in 1997, for Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (New Line), the first live action sequel derived from an arcade game. The $30 million project found itself a new director in John R. Leonetti, who served as the original's director of photography, but the chemistry had been misplaced, as Annihilation couldn't even scrape up half the box office fortune that its predecessor had. A second Kombat sequel, tentively titled Devastation, was shelved after Annihilation ceased to annihilate its competition.

Although there were several full-length animated films that had been adapted from console games prior, the first to enter North American theatres was Pokemon: The First Movie (1998), based on Nintendo's Game Boy role-playing adventures that were all the rage during the second half of the '90s. The Japanese animated feature broke new ground in the world of video game conversions, selling more than $163 million worth of tickets around the world, and inspiring numerous DVD and theatrical follow-ups, including Pokemon: The Movie 2000 (2000) and Pokemon 3: The Movie (2001).

The genre relapsed when, in 1999, 20th Century Fox cast Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Matthew Lillard in Wing Commander, borrowed from a 9-year-old space simulation game that sprouted into an arcade franchise. It's $11.5 million box office take was barely enough to recoup the $30 million it cost to produce the widely-panned film from first-time director Chris Roberts.

Oscar winner Angelina Jolie carried this film species into the new century with her lead role in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), which co-starred her real-life father Jon Voight and the future James Bond, Daniel Craig. Helmed by former TV commercial director Simon West, Tomb Raider was done with class, similar to none of the aforementioned video games-turned-movies, a move that proved profitable at the ticket booths, raking in more than $274 million globally. Set to the thriving action-adventure game series that became one of the top-selling of all-time, Tomb Raider sparked an expensive sequel, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003), which culminated just $156 million after a $120 million budget, while critics were bitter as well. It was then that studios and Jolie both left the series alone, much to the dismay of Lara Croft fans, I'm sure.

Top 10 Grossing Video Game Adaptations (Worldwide):
1. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) - $274.7M
2. Pokemon: The First Movie (1998) - $163.6M
3. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) - $156.5M
4. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) - $147.7M
5. Pokemon: The Movie 2000 (2000) - $133.9M
6. Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) - $129.3M
7. Mortal Kombat (1995) - $122M
8. Max Payne (2008) - $108.2M
9. Resident Evil (2002) - $102.4M
10. Hitman (2007) - $99.9M

2001 also saw one of the most prolific game series, Final Fantasy, transformed into a less-than-memorable computer animated movie, leaving its mark only as the first attempt to produce a photorealistic rendered 3D feature film. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Columbia Pictures), which included the voices of Alec Baldwin and Ving Rhames, cost $137 million to produce, but was only able to make back $85 million, reminding us of the early days of these types of films. A subsequent CGI film, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, followed in 2005, at a cost of $100 million, but failed to rectify the series.

Kick-ass video game heroines proved a hot ticket last year with Tomb Raider, so Screen Gems snagged Mortal Kombat director Paul W.S. Anderson to head Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez in Resident Evil (2002), a zombie fest that blazed through its $32 million budget to pull in more than triple that in gross revenue. The Resident Evil effort prolonged into a theatrical trilogy that included two more live action features (2004's Resident Evil: Apocalypse and 2007's Resident Evil: Extinction) that earned even more than its original (a combined $277.1 million), before Sony Pictures launched a $70 million full-length CGI film titled Resident Evil: Degenration (2008). A fifth film, Afterlife, is expected to follow, though no release date has been issued yet.

Sega's House of the Dead game was next in line for a feature film treatment, which ended up as "an unabashed B-movie" that triggered some of the most horrific feedback apon its 2005 launch, much ado to its director, the ill-fated Uwe Boll, who became synonymous with these video game adaptations. The German-born indie filmmaker, who has to self-fund most of his problematic projects, continued his streak of notoriously bad video game film adapts with Alone in the Dark (2005), BloodRayne (2005), In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007), Postal (2007), BloodRayne II: Deliverance (2007) and last year's Far Cry. Boll has single-handedly devistated a genre that could barely stand another blow, though fortunatelty for us, most of his films have gone unseen by most.

Not counting a few animated offerings and Boll's own ventures, 2005's only game-to-film was Doom (Universal Pictures), a sci-fi horror flick that starred money-maker Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who wasn't even able to save this one. Doomed from the start (pun intended!), the futuristic movie made some $65 million, just $5 million more than what it cost to make. "The performances are awful, the action sequences are impossible to follow, the violence is gratuitous, the lighting is bad and I have my doubts that catering truck was even up to snuff on this project," insisted notable film critic Richard Roeper. A planned sequel was immediatelty put on the back-burner.

In betweem Japan's Forbidden Siren and yet another Pokemon picture came Silent Hill (2006), a creppy tale that helped itself to the storyline of the top-selling Sony Playstation game series that was born 15 years earlier. Silent Hill, the movie, was a subtle success, enough as to inspire an upcoming sequel, though unlikely to ever catch up to the six-part series of video games. Later in the year Summit Entertainment disappointed fans of the popular DOA: Dead or Alive game series with an effortless motion picture that starred Jaime Pressly and was co-produced by Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat). It made $7.5 million, but took almost triple that to get it into theatres.

Skipping over the seemingly-endless string of Japanese-based anime film remodellings, we come to 2007's Hitman, one of the least effective transformations, yet one that managed to profit (barely). A year later brought us a brief look into OneChanbara (2008), which was only compatable with Japanese viewers. Also in '08, Oscar-nominated rapper-turned-model-turned-actor Mark Wahlberg disgraced his resume with a lead role in John Moore's Max Payne (20th Century Fox), a noir action movie that made plenty of dough, but not a lot of fans. Although Payne's stylistic approach and Wahlberg's appeal were considered advantages, as a whole, the film was a dim take on the acclaimed third-person shooter game that won BAFTA's Interactive Entertainment Award in 2001.

The most recent live action film based around characters from a video game is Andrzej Bartkowiak's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (20th Century Fox), which concentrated on the eponymous heroine, played by Smallville's Kristin Kreuk. "There's better staged and more enjoyable brawls between Peter and the Chicken on Family Guy," beckoned one film critic (IGN), but most other reviews boasted a similar stench. The $60 million Chun-Li film gave '09 one of the most hampered theatre releases so far, pulled from multi-plexes after earning back less than $12 million. But there's another fighting game-turned-movie around the corner that may easily break the lengthy streak of disastrous conceptions in this strained genre. Tekken, Dwight H. Little's project based on the cult series of multi-console games, stars nobody in particular and followed a plot we've seen time and time again. Realistically, it's predisposed to tank just as most of its precursors have, but that's not to say there's still hope in future projects.

Next summer, in May 2010, director Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) and Walt Disney Pictures will embark on the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Ben Kingsley. This comes seven years after Ubisoft launched the hugely successful video game of the same name (2003), a third-person action-adventure outting set in 6th century Persia, and a plotline that may be the break this genre of films desperately needs.

Whether Prince of Persia will break the cycle of deplorable video game adaptations or not, studios are sure not to blink an eye. They'll continue to eye the gamer market to determine new fads within a multi-billion-dollar outlet that has lent almost no success stories to its own sub-genre. Just take a look at the countless planned projects for games hitting the silver screen, including BioShock, EverQuest, Driver, Halo, God of War, The Sims, World of Warcraft, Spy Hunter, Metal Gear Solid, and ever Pac-Man! That's right, PAC-MAN!! I guess as long as we have Xbox's and Playstations, we're gonna have tasteless movies that will try and cash in on basement-dwelling virgins desperate to see their simulated heroes on a much bigger screen!

Time magazine's Top 10 Worst Video Game Adaptations:
1. Super Mario Bros. (1993)
2. Street Fighter (1994)
3. Double Dragon (1994)
4. Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
5. BloodRayne (2006)
6. Doom (2006)
7. Hitman (2007)
8. In the Name of the King (2007)
9. Wing Commander (1999)
10. House of the Dead (2003)