The trailer for next year’s Minecraft movie was released on Sept. 4, and well on its way to getting a million views in its first few hours. The upcoming movie based on the best-selling game of all time, starring Jack Black, begs the question: are we officially in the decade of the video game movie?
Video games being adapted into films isn’t anything new. Who could forget the 1993 too-big-to-fail-franchise-that-actually-just-failed-anyway, Super Mario Bros.? The great Bob Hoskins, who played the iconic plumber in the movie, cursed its name until the day he died.
Resident Evil, Doom, Tomb Raider, Silent Hill, and even Street Fighter each got at least one movie, and on occasion, a whole franchise. With a few outliers, none of these films were ever lauded for their quality, aside from the occasional “so bad it’s kind of good” acting from the likes of everyone from Raul Julia to Christopher Lambert.
But last year, Nintendo’s pipe-smart mascot got a mulligan, this time with an animated film made by the same studio that conceived the Minions. The Super Mario Bros. Movie wasn’t simply profitable, it broke records. At the time of its release, it garnered the biggest worldwide opening weekend for an animated film.
Now that the Marvel well has run dry—at least when it comes to box office returns—will video games be the new untapped frontier for blockbuster cinema? The answer, at least in the short term, is an emphatic “Yes.” Of course, that doesn’t mean every franchise will create a bankable hit.
The Pokemon franchise may make excellent Saturday morning fodder, but adapting it would seemingly be hellish, especially considering how dense the game’s lore and rules are. The simplified approach of 2019’s Detective Pikachu eschewed battling for a kid-friendly whodunit using the franchise’s iconic characters, and nabbing $450 million in the process.
Borderlands was dead on arrival when it premiered last month, and has currently only made 31 million dollars back from its projected $110 million dollar budget. The occasional bad penny is more than worth the risk. It used to be, you had a sea of duds with the occasional hit. Now, it’s a pile of hits with the occasional dud.
Five Nights at Freddy’s made almost 300 million on a 20 million dollar budget. The Sonic movie franchise will get its third entry in December, and it’s only 200 million away from breaking the billion dollar barrier. No franchise is safe from either the big or small screen. They made a Tetris movie, for God’s sake! They made a Tetris movie, and it was pretty good.
Currently, there are movies in the works for franchises including The Legend of Zelda, Gears of War, Mega Man, Ghost of Tsushima, Pac-Man, and even ToeJam and Earl, if you can imagine. And that’s not counting the sequels for established franchises like Super Mario, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Detective Pikachu.
The video game movie will officially be a fixture of the silver screen, and from the looks of the recent successes, might actually render some fun popcorn flicks. The possibilities are seemingly endless, at least until the well eventually runs dry.
My fingers are crossed for the Katamari Damacy adaptation, if only for a soundtrack that will make John Williams sound like Billy Ocean.