As the video game industry has exploded over the past few decades, the calls to see wildly popular franchises realised on the big screen have only grown. Unfortunately for fans, adaptations of video games have become synonymous with slapdash production values and tenuous relationships with the source material.
But that’s not to say all of these movies are bad. In fact, there are a handful that are definitely worth a watch. So plug in your controllers and grab your memory cards as we sort the PS1s from the PS-nones in this list of video game adaptations.
Watch – Street Fighter
We know what you’re thinking: isn’t this a notoriously bad film, which sees Belgian-born action man Jean-Claude Van Damme star as the all-American Guile?
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And the answer is yes – but that’s exactly why 1994’s Street Fighter: The Movie is so amazing.
The film only loosely follows the plot of its source material (that’s going to become a running theme through this article), but since Street Fighter II: The World Warrior features a caricatured cast of characters caught up in a battle against a psycho-powered crime boss in a red hat, it makes sense to add a bit more detail.
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Starring Van Damme alongside the incomparable Raul Julia and, for some reason, Kylie Minogue, this action romp from writer-director Steven E. de Souza is truly unforgettable – and Julia, in his final film, steals the show.
Need proof? Here’s one of his lines: “You still refuse to accept my god-hood? Keep your own god! In fact, this might be a good time to pray to him. For I beheld Satan as he fell FROM HEAVEN! LIKE LIGHTNING!”
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With all that in mind, and the tantalising detail of a behind-the-scenes between Van Damme and Kylie Minogue, what’s not to like?
Don’t watch – Double Dragon
Particularly in its earliest days, the video game movie format offered something of a new frontier for filmmakers, with no real precedent set for what these films should be.
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As we’ve seen (and will see again), this often meant the films in question got more than a little bit silly… but in the case of 1994’s Double Dragon, the filmmakers stepped over the line into full-blown stupidity.
In fairness, there are aspects of the Double Dragon movie that at least get points for ambition and good intention: reflecting the environmental concerns of the day, the film presents a future ravaged by global warming (before ‘climate change’ was the preferred nomenclature; the action taking place in a largely flooded Los Angeles.
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However, the movie very quickly gives up any pretence of being thought-provoking in favour of utterly empty-headed humour and two-dimensional characterisations, with cringe-inducing over-acting from all quarters, notably lead actors Scott Wolf, Mark Dacascos and Alyssa Milano (to say nothing of their even more cringe-inducing mid-90s wardrobes).
If Double Dragon has any saving grace at all, it’s the truly impressive martial arts prowess of Mark Dacascos – which the actor recently put to far better use in John Wick: Chapter 3, more than redeeming himself for this early misstep.
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Watch – Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros is another film that adds a dollop of tantalising weirdness to its source material – and even though it might go a little too far for some tastes, there’s something seductive about the film’s sheer insanity.
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Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo are the titular plumbing duo who, for some reason, live in Brooklyn. Transported to an alternate dimension populated by humanoids who evolved from dinosaurs, the brothers must rescue a princess from the clutches of King Koopa (Dennis Hopper), who plans to merge the two realities and become the dictator of both.
To address the clear negatives first: Super Mario Bros is confusing, and sorely lacking the iconic character design of the video games, with Mario and Luigi up against vaguely reptilian mobsters in a bleak industrial cityscape, rather than the colourful fairy tale wonderland we might have expected based on the source material.
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All that having been said, if you can take the Super Mario Bros movie on its own terms, there’s something strangely pleasing about a family-friendly dystopian cyberpunk fantasy, whose vision of blue collar heroes battling lizard men from another dimension could have come straight out of a David Icke book.
And in any case, while the Super Mario Bros cast by all accounts had a pretty miserable experience making the film, there’s no way you can fail to get some entertainment value out of a cast including such luminaries as the sadly missed Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper.
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Don’t watch – Doom
The long-running Doom series was perhaps the first video game property to demonstrate how truly scary gaming can get – so hopes were high that the franchise would prove similarly awe-inspiring on the big screen.
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Unfortunately, the 2005 Doom movie did little to quell speculation from more obsessive fans that all video game movies were inherently cursed (not that we subscribe to that view here, of course).
The sci-fi horror centres on a platoon of space marines, among them Karl Urban and Dwayne Johnson (still known professionally as The Rock at the time), who are sent on a rescue mission to Mars when a research facility is overrun by genetically-modified monsters.
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It should have been Predator-style fun, but other than one fan-pleasing sequence which adopts the game’s signature first-person shooter perspective, Doom is painfully been-there, done-that – and it’s all been done far better elsewhere.
Critics were unkind, fans were largely disappointed, and in years since even Dwayne Johnson (who tried to subvert expectation by not playing the lead hero) has admitted that the Doom movie is a lesson in “what not to do” when adapting a video game to the big screen.
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Watch – Rampage
Fast-forward 13 years, and Dwayne Johnson (now known by his real name, and firmly established as one of the biggest movie stars in the world) took on his second video game movie to considerably greater success, both creatively and commercially.
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With so many classic video games still yet to be adapted to the screen, Rampage doesn’t seem the most likely contender for a mega-budget movie. After all, the arcade favourite is about big animals smashing up buildings – and that’s it.
And yet, helped by the kind of exuberant muscularity that only Dwayne Johnson can provide, the Rampage movie is a whole heap of fun. Unlike all the skyscrapers in the movie, which end up as heaps of rubble.
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Rampage casts Johnson as a soldier-turned-primatologist whose world is thrown into disarray after a rogue pathogen makes his gorilla buddy really big and aggressive. The movie co-stars a wolf and a crocodile, both of which are also really big and aggressive, funnily enough.
With the mutated animals loosed on a dense, urban area, the only noise you can hear above all the crashing and explosions is the high-pitched whirr of Frank Lloyd Wright spinning rapidly in his grave. It’s not much more than that, but sometimes a smash-and-grab film is all you need.
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Don’t watch – Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Forget for a moment the inherent flaws of casting Jake Gyllenhaal as a Persian prince. Forget the casting of Gemma Arterton as an Iranian princess. Forget that the plot involves a time-travelling dagger and ancient gods trapped in a big hourglass.
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Actually, don’t forget those things about Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – they’re all terrible and someone needs to answer for them.
Released in 2010, the Prince of Persia movie emerged in the era when it was trendy to sell Gyllenhaal as an action hero (a category that might also include the more interesting Source Code and End of Watch).
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While he’s charming and princely enough in the film, the actor’s talents as an intense weirdo are wasted. Roger Ebert described Gyllenhaal’s performance as able to “make the cover of a muscle mag, but he plays Dastan as if harboring Spider-Man’s doubts and insecurities.”
Interestingly, Gyllenhaal would go on to play one of said webslinger’s nemeses, Mysterio, in 2019’s Spider-Man: Far from Home, a blockbuster in which the star appears far more comfortable.
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Watch – Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
If you’re looking for a video game movie blockbuster, 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider has to be one of the best.
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Sure, the plot is about the Illuminati scheming to exploit a grand planetary alignment for the purposes of time travel, but all that really matters is Angelina Jolie kicking people in the face.
Jolie – the daughter of actor Jon Voight – had grown up in Hollywood, and even won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Girl, Interrupted in 1999. But it was Lara Croft: Tomb Raider that established the future Maleficent star as a leading actor.
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The film grossed a sensational $274,703,340 worldwide, initially besting pop culture stalwart Shrek at the box office, and it remains one of the few video game adaptations with a woman in the lead.
It’s worth remembering that this was uncommon in 2001, even relative to today’s scarcity of female-fronted action movies.
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Don’t watch – The Angry Birds Movie
Mobile game Angry Birds didn’t necessarily have much in the way of cinematic potential, beyond the fact that it’s got brand name recognition in spades. One could be forgiven for thinking that any movie based on the game would be a cynical cash-grab.
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It’s hardly surprising, then, that 2016’s The Angry Birds Movie was indeed cynical and bald-faced in its grabbing for cash – and it was thoroughly successful in doing so, netting over $352 million worldwide, making it one of the most commercially successful video game movies yet.
The Angry Birds Movie packs in an impressive cast including Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Kate McKinnon, Sean Penn, Keegan-Michael Key, Bill Hader, and Peter Dinklage, but it completely fails to provide a script of similar calibre.
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Instead, we’re left with a wafer-thin premise, and a deluge of poorly realised jokes hoping to placate the bored parents in the audience – and including a number of gags that are thoroughly inappropriate for younger viewers in the process.
The reviews may not have been glowing, but the box office receipts were sufficient for The Angry Birds Movie to get a sequel in 2019 – which, happily, was a significant improvement on its predecessor in all departments.
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Watch – Tomb Raider
Just as the Tomb Raider games were rebooted in 2013, so too was the movie series in 2018, with Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander taking over from Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft.
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Vaguely following the plot of the rebooted game, this version introduces a young, less experienced Croft as she pursues the shadowy organisation Trinity, on a search for the tomb of Himiko, the Queen of Yamatai.
As outlandish as that may sound, Tomb Raider is for the most part a much more grounded jungle-based survivalist adventure – almost like a teen-friendly Deliverance or Apocalypto.
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Whilst Vikander’s casting didn’t go down well with all the fans, the actor brings a remarkable physicality to the role. Vikander’s vulnerability and humanity also make her far more relatable than Jolie’s take on the character ever was.
Tomb Raider took an impressive $273.5 million at the box office, and a sequel is scheduled for release in 2021, which might be taken as a sign that video game movies are being taken seriously at last.
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Don’t watch – Max Payne
Video game series Max Payne was always a clear contender for a cinematic adaptation, with its dark and intriguing blend of detective thriller elements and bizarre, occult overtones.
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Unfortunately, the 2008 Max Payne movie may have captured something of the game’s aesthetic, but it completely failed to deliver a satisfying experience in its own right.
Mark Wahlberg – a talented actor who has sadly proven time and again that he has difficulty telling a great project from a bad one – certainly looks the part of the bereaved detective obsessively hunting down the killer of his wife and daughter.
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However, this is largely the problem with the Max Payne movie: it’s only interested in appearances, instead putting all its energy into a stylish-looking, heavily CGI-based visage which is more than a little reminiscent (derivative, even?) of Sin City.
While any attempts at coherent storytelling largely fall by the wayside, the film also betrays the spirit of the Max Payne games given that it tones down the grimness and violence for the sake of a PG-13 rating.
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Watch – Mortal Kombat
Discounting everything else that’s great about this film, Mortal Kombat deserves a rewatch simply for its iconic theme music. (It’s been scientifically proven that it’s impossible not to yell “MORTAL KOMBAT!” while listening.)
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On a serious note, there’s actually a lot to like about the 1995 martial arts epic, often unfavourably compared to the Street Fighter movie since the two fighting game franchises have had a decades-long rivalry.
Still, just going on the raw numbers, Mortal Kombat outperformed the competition, grossing $122.1 million (significantly more than Street Fighter) on a budget of $18 million (significantly less than Street Fighter).
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It’s easy to see why. Mortal Kombat leans heavily on its exotic locations to accent its superb martial arts sequences. Of course the plot is nonsense, but you aren’t reading an article about video game movies to find the next Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Suitably gory with beautiful settings, Mortal Kombat is worth giving another go, providing you can temporarily block out what the critics think.
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Don’t watch – Resident Evil
There’s a reason why Resident Evil has become one of the most iconic video game franchises of all time, having practically invented the genre of ‘survival horror.’
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With few resources and tenacious enemies in pursuit, you’re tasked with overcoming puzzles in a tense, unsettlingly quiet world. Resident Evil the movie, however, discards this delicate moodiness in favour of a zombie-filled slugfest.
While it maintains series staples like the zombifying T-virus and the setting of a spooky mansion, 2002’s big-screen Resident Evil lacks the betrayals and gut-wrenching twists present in the original game, giving us instead a more straightforward action-horror romp with Milla Jovovich as Alice, butt-kicking heroine in an impractical red dress.
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Nor is it the case that director Paul WS Anderson (who did a better job on Mortal Kombat) simply didn’t know very much about Resident Evil – there are references scattered throughout the movie that link it to the games – yet the film still ignores that which makes the games work.
Resident Evil still proved successful enough to spawn five sequels, with the franchise grossing upwards of $1.2 billion worldwide so far – but we’re still hoping the Resident Evil reboot that’s currently in development will prove to be less crash-bang-wallop action, more intense zombie horror.
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Watch – Detective Pikachu
After the critical and commercial disaster of Super Mario Bros, Nintendo seemed to learn a lesson: rather than sacrificing their intellectual property to the whims of filmmakers, they would instead keep their franchises on a tight leash.
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So, for 26 years, no video game adaptations of Nintendo properties were made. That is, until 2019’s Detective Pikachu. There’s been a steady stream of straight-to-DVD Pokémon movies over the years, but it’s fair to say that adapting a niche spin-off game was a surprising choice by the video game behemoth.
Detective Pikachu the game does what it says on the tin, with the iconic yellow electro-rat solving crimes. But on the big screen, it’s even better.
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Pikachu is chubby and adorable – if voiced perhaps a tad too sarcastically by Ryan Reynolds – and the plot is a perfectly functional pace-setter as we take in a gallery of variously terrifying and adorable Pokémon.
Detective Pikachu isn’t exactly Citizen Kane (though the upcoming sequel could yet again surprise us all), but you’d be hard-pressed to find a cuter, more wise-cracking video game adaptation than this.
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Don’t watch – Alone in the Dark
Alone in the Dark was released for MS-DOS in 1992, quickly becoming one of the most acclaimed video games in history. While its polygonal aesthetic may look dated nowadays, this was arguably the first survival horror game, and in 3D!
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So, when Hollywood became obsessed with video game adaptations in the early noughties, it was clear which game was next on the list. That’s right: Alone in the Dark. Unfortunately, they picked the fourth one.
Directed by Uwe Boll, the notoriously schlocky filmmaker-cum-restaurateur, the film stars Christian Slater as a supernatural detective who’s investigating the disappearance of an ancient, Mayan-esque civilisation.
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Slater then has to use his enhanced strength and speed (don’t ask) to fend off this civilisation as it pours back through a rip in the space-time continuum (again, don’t ask).
Alone in the Dark earned only 1% on Rotten Tomatoes, but inexplicably still got a sequel in 2008. We don’t recommend either movie.
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Watch – DOA: Dead or Alive
As we’ve established pretty well by this point, you don’t necessarily go to a video game adaptation expecting something deep, meaningful and challenging.
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Sure enough, 2006’s DOA: Dead or Alive most definitely doesn’t go out of its way to push the intellectual boundaries of cinema – but there’s no denying it provides more than enough popcorn entertainment to make for an entertaining hour-and-a-half.
In common with Tecmo’s Dead or Alive video game series, the set-up of director Corey Yuen’s movie is simple: fighters from around the world are invited to a tournament on a remote, luxurious island with the promise of a $10 million prize for the winner.
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Also in common with the games, DOA: Dead or Alive places particular emphasis on its female fighters, all of whom have a tendency to dress skimpily when doing battle. Actresses Jaime Pressly, Holly Valance and Devon Aoki must have been good sports to put up with the cameras constantly shooting them from voyeuristic angles, particularly when the movie borrows a key device from the games and throws in a gratuitous beach volleyball sequence.
DOA: Dead or Alive does little to fend off accusations of sexism, but however salacious it may get, there’s never any question that the ladies are taking care of business without male assistance.
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Don’t watch – Hitman
The 2007 big-screen take on the Eidos Interactive stealth game series Hitman made a decent profit at the box office, but left most of the audience (including but not limited to fans of the game) hugely disappointed.
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Timothy Olyphant takes the lead as 47, a master hitman trained in his profession since his youth, and who gets entangled in a large-scale political conspiracy.
As is so often the case in video game adaptations, storytelling takes a back seat to stylistics in Hitman, and it’s often hard to keep track of what’s meant to be going on, to say nothing of the difficulty of getting emotionally invested at all.
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Timothy Olyphant was a last-minute replacement for Vin Diesel in the Hitman lead: years later Olyphant admitted he only took the role because he needed the money after TV’s Deadwood was cancelled, and blasted the film as a “piece of s**t.”
Fans and critics tended to agree, and the property was rebooted without Olyphant in 2015 as Hitman: Agent 47 – although this too proved a major turkey.
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Watch – Silent Hill
The bulk of the properties in our list thus far have been ultimately pretty straightforward action-based romps in which our heroes solve their problems via punching, kicking, running and shooting: all of this being an accurate reflection of the games they’re based on, for the most part.
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However, the Silent Hill video game series isn’t quite so simple – and 2006’s big screen adaptation of the game from director Christophe Gans and Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary goes suitably outside the box.
Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean star as Rose and Christopher Da Silva, a couple whose adopted daughter is haunted by visions of a mysterious ghost town called Silent Hill, which leads Rose to think that taking her back to Silent Hill might prove therapeutic. This, of course, is a huge mistake.
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What follows doesn’t always make all that much sense from a logical perspective, and at upwards of two hours it’s definitely a little overlong; but as an exercise in ghostly atmospherics and bizarre, nightmarish imagery, Silent Hill is hard to fault.
Critics and fans were a little divided, but Silent Hill surely stands proud as the single scariest video game movie yet made, and performed well enough to get a sequel in 2012’s Silent Hill: Revelation.
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Don’t watch – Need for Speed
The success of the Fast & Furious franchise has proved that movies centred on fancy cars driving around at high speed can bring in some major coin at the global box office.
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Hopes were high that 2014’s big screen take on the EA video game series Need for Speed would prove just as much of a high octane hit – but sadly, it all wound up something of a wreck.
Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul landed his first major leading movie role as Tobey Marshall, a top mechanic and driver out for justice after he’s sent down for a crime he didn’t commit.
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What should have been a fun, simple car-racing adventure winds up overlong, incoherent and more likely to have you checking your watch than sitting on the edge of your seat.
About the only things of note in Need for Speed are an agreeably hissable bad guy turn from Dominic Cooper, and a supporting turn from future Bohemian Rhapsody Oscar-winner and Bond villain Rami Malek.
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Watch – The Witcher
We’ve dealt exclusively with movies based on video games thus far in this list – but we couldn’t possibly talk about video game adaptations worth watching without mentioning Netflix’s The Witcher.
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Adapted both from the video game series and the original novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher casts Henry Cavill as the gravel-throated Geralt of Rivia, a ‘witcher’ with enhanced abilities who walks the land slaying monsters for pay.
As simple as that might initially sound, The Witcher demands attention on the part of the viewer given that the action flits back and forth through time.
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The initial eight-episode run established The Witcher as a compelling fantasy drama, which should more than fill the gap left by Game of Thrones in the contemporary TV marketplace.
And in common with Game of Thrones, The Witcher balances its sophisticated storytelling with all the visceral thrills that older viewers could hope for, with no shortage of violence, carnality and potty-mouthed dialogue.
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Don’t watch – Warcraft
Please believe us when we say that no one wanted Warcraft to be a truly great film as much as we did. Hopes were high all around, and we had every reason to think these would be met.
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Sadly, despite the earlier successes of director Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code), the man at the helm was not able to make the cinematic epic everyone expected from his big-screen take on the massively popular online RPG World of Warcraft.
Also known as Warcraft: The Beginning (a sadly over-optimistic title, reflecting initial plans for a franchise), the 2016 film sees the worlds of orcs and men come crashing headfirst into one another, with the threat of a mighty conflict looming.
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Unfortunately, the film never manages to find its heart through the weight of establishing its own mythology and piling on the computer-generated spectacle – all of which couldn’t help but feel a bit over-familiar in the wake of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogy.
Warcraft performed well enough at the box office ($439 million worldwide, on a $160 million budget) to earn the dubious merit of the most commercially successful video game movie to date, but not quite so well as to spawn the intended sequels.
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