GoKawiilThe Last of Us (2023). Credit: HBO.
Intro: The Tale of Two Super Mario Movies
Adaptations of the beloved Super Mario Bros. franchise have twice served as major test cases for the commercial viability of video game movies. One was terrible; the other, paradigm-shifting.
We’ll start with the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, which was a troubled production from the outset (to say the least). For some reason, filmmakers initially envisioned a darker, dystopian rendition of Nintendo’s signature property. But shortly before production began, studio executives grew concerned that the movie would alienate younger audiences and ordered substantial rewrites. The result was a cinematic Frankenstein: part grimy cyberpunk fantasy, part children’s comedy, punctuated with out-of-place dialogue catering to die-hard fans.
Critics panned the film, audiences rejected the slapdash adaptation, and it earned a disastrous $21 million against a $48 million budget. For years, Super Mario Bros. was the foremost cautionary tale against Hollywood video game adaptations.
In 2023, Illumination, the studio behind the ever-present Minions plague, released a faithful animated adaptation of the Super Mario Bros. universe that grossed over $1.3 billion. Its success arrived amid a broader wave of well-received video game adaptations across film and television, with projects like The Last of Us and Fallout demonstrating how gaming franchises could please fans and normies alike.
Over the past five years, superhero stories and comic-book properties have been cycling out of studio slates and streaming catalogs, replaced by a growing wave of video game–based projects. As someone who wants big-budget movies to be good—and has become exhausted with the artistic inconsistency of superhero films—my main question is whether video games will prove any better as source material. Should we expect higher-quality storytelling than the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has delivered in recent years? And, if so, what makes video games different?
So today, we’ll explore the rise of video game adaptations, investigate the massive pent-up demand for this format, and examine the unique demographic makeup driving the commercial (and artistic) potential of these projects.
Hollywood’s Video Game Era Is Here. Will It Be Any Good?
Over the last three decades, Hollywood has moved away from original screenplays and literary adaptations in favor of fictional universes with built-in fandoms—first through comic books and, increasingly, through video games. Amid a tumultuous post-pandemic box office, adaptations of superhero stories and gaming universes account for nearly half of the highest-grossing films of the 2020s (thus far).
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