HOLLYWOOD LEVELS UP
As the appetite for comic book movies wanes, Hollywood is looking to the world of gaming for source material — and die-hard fans
We’ve come a long way from Super Mario Bros… Released in cinemas in May 1993, up against a summer of memorable blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Cliffhanger, and The Fugitive, the first-ever live-action movie adapted from a video game was seen as being as close to a sure bet as possible.
Instead, we got a critical and commercial mega-flop, and an end product that star Bob Hoskins said he considered to be the single worst job he’d ever had. It was so bad that both the company, Nintendo, as well as Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, wouldn’t allow any more adaptations of their works for a long, long time.
Jump to April 2023, almost exactly 30 years to the day since the original version came out, and the animated Super Mario Bros. movie hits cinemas. It becomes the second-biggest box office hit of the year worldwide (behind only Barbie), with rumours of a sequel and several spin-offs in the wake of its massive success.
In those intervening three decades, Hollywood has tried — and almost exclusively failed — to do with video game movies what they had only recently successfully done with comic book movies. But now that tide of bad luck is finally starting to change.
In those first few years after the release of that initial Mario movie, the trainwrecks that followed were jaw-dropping in their uniformity of awfulness: the Jean-Claude Van Damme-starring Street Fighter; the beyond-camp Mortal Kombat; the Angelina Jolie version of Tomb Raider; the scare-free, excitementlite horror action Resident Evil.
It almost perfectly mirrors the early days of comic book adaptations. Although there were two outliers in 1978’s Superman and 1989’s Batman, they were surrounded by the likes of Supergirl, Howard The Duck, Judge Dredd, and Spawn. Comic book movies would eventually get better, finally reaching their apex in 2008, with the double-whammy of The Dark Knight and the first Iron Man. Since then, comic book movies have been nominated for Best Picture (Black Panther) as well as winning Best Animated Feature (Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse) and more than one acting Oscar (Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight, Joaquin Phoenix for Joker).
However, the flooding of the market — there are 33 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe alone, with seven more in production — has led to a massive fall in interest in the superhero movie genre.
Last year saw a number of comic movie flops: Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, The Flash, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Blue Beetle and The Marvels all hugely underperformed at the box office.
As a result, Hollywood has started to look elsewhere for source material. And where better than the world of video games: a sector with a gigantic pre-existing audience that’s already making eye-watering amounts of money.
Within 24 hours of its console release, Grand Theft Auto V made $815m in sales, and to date has sold just shy of 200 million copies. Build-your-own-world adventure game Minecraft has sold over 300 million copies. The Call Of Duty series has amassed over 425 million in sales over the years, with that franchise alone worth over $31bn.
The crossover potential is a no-brainer for Hollywood studios — if they can get the movies right. Arguably the best of the big screen
adaptations to date is 2019’s Pokemon Detective Pikachu, which still only reached a middling 68pc on influential movie review site Rotten Tomatoes.
However, there has been much more success on TV. Last year, The Last Of Us took home eight Emmys, and leading man Pedro Pascal nabbed the Best Actor award at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, beating out the cast of the final season of Succession in the process. Coming next is the highly anticipated streaming debut of Fallout, with all episodes landing on Prime Video from April 11. The series is based on a game that was launched in 1997 and has been pumping out sequels ever since.
Starring Ella Purnell and Kyle MacLachlan, it’s set in postapocalyptic America, where the privileged live in fallout shelters called vaults, while outside lies a lawless and violent wasteland. Interestingly, the TV series is being developed and directed by someone who kicked off their own career by pushing the envelope on comic book movies: Jonathan Nolan.
Nolan is brother to Oscarwinning Oppenheimer director Christopher, with whom he co-wrote the screenplays for The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises before heading off into the world of blockbuster TV, creating the likes of Person of Interest and Westworld. In the background, however, he has become a committed gamer. “It started for me with Fallout 3 (released in 2008), which devoured about a year of my life,” Nolan says. “I was an aspiring young writer at that point [and] it almost derailed my entire career. It’s so ludicrously playable and fun. The games were just incredible.”
He jumped at the chance to develop Fallout for the small screen. “It’s such a rare thing and such an unbelievable thing, and I’ve gotten to do it twice in my career — to take something that you love and get a chance to play in that universe, to create your own version of that universe. The first go-round for me was Batman ,and this time with Fallout: a series of games that I absolutely loved.”
Working with Todd Howard, director of Bethesda Game Studios which makes the Fallout series, Nolan acted as producer and directed the first three episodes.
He says the project has taken several years to come to fruition. “About five years ago, Todd and I went and had lunch together. It was a bit of a fanning-out moment for me, and we just started talking about the possibilities.
“I think one of the things that’s so powerful about the Fallout series is that every game is a little different. Different characters, a different setting, and a different look into this extraordinary universe. And so we came out of that lunch with a handshake deal that we were gonna try to make this work.”
That might be one of the biggest lessons in the improvement of this genre of movies: getting input from the people who actually made the games in the first place. The creator ofT he Last Of Us co-developed and directed episodes of the HBO adaptation, the creator of the Five Nights at Freddy’s game co-wrote the script for the successful bigscreen version, and the producers of Halo on Paramount+ were also the producers of the hit game series it was based on.
The same goes with Fallout, with Todd Howard explaining why he had turned down years of offers to have his game adapted, and why he said yes this time. “People would approach us over a 10-year period after Fallout 3 came out, from 2009 on, to adapt Fallout to film or television,” he says. “And we took a very cautious approach.
“I was such a fan of the movies [Nolan] did and the TV he was doing, and I actually had someone reach out [to him]. And when I first talked to him, honestly, it was like someone I had known for a long time, obviously played the games a ton, and his approach, right from the get-go, was in sync with what I was thinking.”
Looking forward, things appear even brighter for the future of video games on screen. This year will deliver two cinematic outings: Borderlands ,a Guardians of the Galaxy-esque action adventure starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart, and Sonic The Hedgehog 3, which has proven to be one of the more commercially successful franchises of recent years.
Beyond that, Jason Momoa and Jennifer Coolidge (a match made in heaven) are teaming up for a Minecraft movie; we’ve got the second season of The Last Of Us; while huge games like Zelda and God Of War are attracting the biggest and best Hollywood has to offer. If they could take the concept of a man who fights crime while dressed as a bat and turn that into one of the best blockbusters of all time, imagine what could be done with the untapped potential of the gaming catalogue. All it takes is a true lover of games to give us something magical.
It’s such a rare thing — to take something that you love and get a chance to play in that universe, to create your own version