More often than not, video game movies take something we know, love, and obsess over and transform it into an unrecognizable monster at worst—or a forgettable, underwhelming experience at best. Happy endings in the video game movie genre can be hard to come by.
While all video game movie adaptations miss the mark when translating the spirit of a game to the silver screen, some are better than others. 2006’s Silent Hill wasn’t so bad. Pokémon Detective Pikachu is cute and fun, and doesn’t require extensive knowledge of the Pokémon universe to enjoy. Meanwhile, some video game movies are so bad that they’ve been able to transcend criticism and ridicule over time, like the Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raúl Juliá-led 1994 classic Street Fighter.
In this video, we take you through our top not-so-bad and worst video game movies of all time. Whether you’re a source material purist, a casual movie-goer, or a film critic, we can all still agree that video game movies can sometimes, maybe all the time, be terribly disappointing. Who knows, though: Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will make a great horror movie about Animal Crossing, or a rom-com Dead by Daylight. One can only hope.
DISCUSSION
Feels like the biggest hurdle for older video game movie adaptations is a lack of trust in or knowledge of the source material. (Except for Warcraft, which is an exception that sort of proves the rule.)
I feel like that might go away as a.) video games have become more story-driven and cinematic and b.) the audiences for games have now aged into being able to produce films about ‘em.
Anyway, both Sonic and Detective Pikachu were loads of fun, did their own thing while respecting the source material, and I want to see way more. (Related: I lost my mind at Bill Nighy extolling the virtues of Mew in real life! I love it! Who doesn’t love that? Oh! And when Larry King tried to do Sonic’s voice? Good stuff.)