How video games came out of the basement – and ate up Hollywood
Once seen as being for fans only, films based on computer games are now attracting Hollywood’s finest. investigates
At the end of Todd Field’s multi-Oscar-nominated film Tár, Cate Blanchett’s “cancelled” conductor is consigned to a fate worse than unemployment: leading the orchestra at a fancydress concert for fans of Monster Hunter, the popular fantasy video game. Blanchett herself, on the other hand, had arrived on the set of Tár fresh from the Hungary set of Borderlands, a forthcoming video-game-inspired film. Spun off from a four-part shoot-’em-up series that began in 2009, it was written by Craig Mazin, the Emmy-winning screenwriter of
Chernobyl – and co-creator of
The Last of Us, the acclaimed HBO zombie-apocalypse series adapted from a 2013 PlayStation survival adventure.
Until very recently, such projects were – fairly, for the most part – dismissed as licensed cash-ins, made purely for fans with low standards. But over the past few years, an odd shift has taken place. With Hollywood’s most acclaimed talents now wading into the button-mashing fray, is the video-game movie finally becoming respectable?
For now, “respectable” is still pushing it. The latest addition to the canon, released in cinemas this weekend, is The Super Mario Bros Movie, from Nintendo and the studio behind Minions, Illumination. It’s hardly a critical hit: the first wave of reviews, collated by Rotten Tomatoes, skew only 53 per cent positive, and personally, as I wrote earlier this week, “no film has ever made me feel more like I was being frogmarched round a branch of Toys R Us”. Nonetheless, it’s predicted to be one of 2023’s biggest box-office hits: early ticket sales suggest it will earn back its estimated $100million (£80million) budget twice over in its opening weekend alone.
There are a number of reasons for this, one being the dearth of competition. Mario is the first major family film to be released since Puss in Boots: The Last Wish in early February, and has the field to itself until Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid arrives at the end of May. But another is the sheer size of
Super Mario Bros’s target audience. More than 60 per cent of British adults – and 93 per cent of children – play video games, and
Mario is one of the medium’s most venerable, accessible and pioneering series. Since the release of the first 1985 instalment on the original Nintendo Entertainment System – the one that looked like a cross between a VHS player and a Star Wars prop – it has sold more than 413 million units (not including its racing-, sports- and party-game sidelines) and has made more than $30billion worldwide. The most lucrative film franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is more than $1billion off that pace.
The value of games studios reflects these extraordinary numbers. Activision Blizzard, the makers of such lucrative perennials as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, is worth almost $67billion, putting in the shade all its Hollywood equivalents bar Disney and Sony. Meanwhile, on Sky TV and its streaming platform Now, The Last of Us drew over three million regular viewers in the UK, making it more popular than the Game of Thrones prequel series, House of the Dragon. No wonder studio boardrooms are widely said to be filled with executives pointing and spluttering: “Where are our ones of those?”
The answer? Probably “don’t worry – en route”. In addition to the Blanchett-backed Borderlands, this year will also yield Gran Turismo, a Sony-made sports drama starring Orlando Bloom, and inspired by the Sony-made series of driving games. A third
‘The endgame is the total franchisification of everything, maximising revenue’
film is also expected to begin filming, ready for a Christmas 2024 release; the first two took $710million between them, despite opening at opposite ends of the pandemic. Still bigger titles gather in the mist: a Metal Gear Solid starring Oscar Isaac; a Silent Hill with Jeremy Irvine; Netflix adaptations of Horizon Zero Dawn
and BioShock.
The current gold rush got under way around 2018, and has thus far produced a number of hits, some of which were even well-reviewed: the two existing Sonics, the teen
Da Vinci Code-like adventure
Uncharted, the monster movie Rampage, the 2018 Tomb Raider reboot, and Detective Pikachu. This custard-coloured rodent hails from the Pokémon series of cuddly monster-collecting adventures, which eclipse even Mario commercially, having made an estimated $90–100billion worldwide. Notably, all of these were PG- or 12A-rated mainstream releases, a far cry from the tough-talking B-movie-grade adaptations of the 2000s, such as Max Payne, Doom, Resident Evil
and Hitman.
What changed? Chris Schilling, deputy editor of the video-game magazine Edge, puts the move down to two crucial factors, the first being the ages of the executives calling the shots. “The decision-makers today, as well as the established writers and filmmakers, are of the first generation who grew up with video games,” he explains. “People in their 40s and early 50s are well-versed in the medium’s visual language and history in a way those only a few years older might not be.”
Look back to the early 2000s, when studios were scrambling to find a ready source of franchises besides comic books, and you can see that the generational switch had yet to take place. Instead, Hollywood bet big on legends and boys’-own history: Robin Hood; Conan the
Barbarian; Tarzan; Peter Pan and Hercules (twice each); the Battle of Thermopylae (in 300 and its sequel); the myth of Perseus (Clash and Wrath of the Titans).
Lots of these floundered: John Carter, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels, lost Disney $200million, and the same studio’s remake of The Lone Ranger fared little better. Board games were also momentarily considered. Peter Berg and Universal brought us a (dreadful) Battleship film in 2012, while plans were made for features based on Monopoly and the American childhood staple Candy Land.
One pivotal factor in the rise of video-game adaptations, says Schilling, was the inferiority complex on the other side of every licensing deal. “However big the industry was becoming, there was still a craving for prestige and wider artistic recognition that only an older medium like cinema could provide,” he says. “One reason The Last of Us was adapted into a TV series so successfully is that it was halfway there already. It borrowed from existing postapocalyptic fiction like The Road,
the writing was unusually strong, and the performance capture [the process of digitising actors’ movements into a game] was cutting-edge.”
Schilling suggests that AAA titles – known as “Triple A”, the games industry’s equivalent of blockbusters – are now often built specifically to make such crossovers as painless as possible. Take the God of War series, “which began as pure hack-and-slash combat”, he explains. “Then when it was relaunched by Sony in 2018 after their success with The Last of Us, it had been given a deeper story, richer characters, and essentially transformed into a prestige project.”
The endgame? “It’s the total franchisification of everything, isn’t it?” Schilling laughs. “Films and series in between games and vice versa, maximising every possible revenue stream among fans and casual audiences alike. As there is in Hollywood, [in the video game industry] there’s a lot of Marvel envy around.”
Just as superhero fatigue appears to be kicking in, cinema may have found its new fixation. And in the meantime, we should probably congratulate Lydia Tár on her savvy career move.