Can Pokemon break video game curse?
A live-action big-screen adaptation due to film in 2017
Pokemon is about to try to lure fans back indoors. Legendary Entertainment will launch the first live-action Pokemon franchise with a Detective Pikachu movie, Variety reports. The film will be fast-tracked so production begins in 2017.
Producers might want to set the bar higher than “best live-action videogame adaptation ever,” judging by the way every previous example of joystick cinema turned out. Super Mario Bros. (1993) Let’s call this the rust standard for video game adaptations, a murky, grotesque no-joy ride that retained none of the sprightly charm of its inspiration. Star Bob Hoskins later called it “the worst thing I ever did.” Rotten Tomatoes score: 15 per cent Critical barb: “You look at the movie and you see millions of dollars on the screen in special effects . . . and it doesn’t add up to anything. It’s just a lot of people running around, all talking at once, and a plot that nobody cares anything about.” — Roger Ebert Domestic gross: $20.9 million Street Fighter (1994) Even a quarter might have been too much to pay for this mess, which burned out of North American theatres faster than a Hadoken. JeanClaude Van Damme later admitted to having a serious drug problem during filming, and also claimed to have an affair with co-star Kylie Minogue. Rotten Tomatoes score: 12 per cent Critical barb: “A dreary, overstuffed hodgepodge of poorly edited martial arts sequences and often unintelligible dialogue.” — The New York Times Domestic gross: $33.4 million Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) The first video game-adapted smash — though 1995’s Mortal Kombat was modestly successful — the Angelina Jolie-starring adventure still earned the double-barrelled wrath of critics who regarded the movie as empty calories. Rotten Tomatoes score: 19 per cent Critical barb: “Loud, banal, empty, frenzied, plasticized, flavourless, drab, violent in a bloodless way and sexy in a sexless way.” — The Washington Post Domestic gross: $131.2 million Doom (2005) The lowest-grossing and worst-reviewed starring role of Dwayne Johnson’s career, this adaptation of the legendary shooter can truly be considered his personal Rock Bottom. On the bright side, he lost the Razzie Award for worst actor to Rob Schneider (for Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo). Rotten Tomatoes score: 19 per cent Critical barb: “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 the catering truck was even up to snuff on this project.” — Richard Roeper Domestic gross: $28.2 million Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) If you can believe it, this lightly regarded Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle actually has the best reviews of any liveaction video-game adaptation ever made.
Still, it’s mostly remembered for criticism of its whitewashed casting and for Gyllenhaal’s transformative workout regimen. Rotten Tomatoes score: 36 per cent Critical barb: “Prince of Persia, a movie born of a video game, is at war with itself, and the bad guys win.” — The Wall Street Journal Domestic gross: $90.8 million Warcraft (2016) The most recent attempt at making a motion picture from pixels, Warcraft only qualifies as a bomb at home; it cast a spell on international audiences to amass the biggest-ever gross for a video-game flick. How long will that title hold? Well, Assassin’s Creed comes out in December and, in the theatre as in life, Pokemon are just around the corner. Rotten Tomatoes score: 29 per cent Critical barb: “Sitting through Warcraft is like watching a heavily abridged Lord of the Rings with all the good characters taken out.” — Peter Howell, Toronto Star Domestic gross: $47 million