Video Game Movies Win Neither Praise Nor Money. So Why Has Hollywood Made More Than 30 of Them?

First it was because games were booming. Then it was because Hollywood ran out of ideas. Now the game companies have joined in too.

"This is a monster win for a monster franchise." Forbes contributor Scott Mendelson wrote that after Resident Evil took in $94 million over its first three days in China, stunning all of Hollywood.

Part of the shock was that the film had opened in North America a month earlier and had made only $26 million there — less than half what it cost. More to the point, video game movies like Resident Evil had long been a byword for bad films and lost money. "Video Game Movies Suck," reads the title of an article on TvTropes, and it probably spoke for all of Hollywood.

No wonder. From the first video game movie, Super Mario Bros., in 1993, to now, 32 films have been adapted from games, and not one has scored above 45% on Rotten Tomatoes. No other kind of film has ever been treated this way.

More than two decades on, Hollywood seems to have learned nothing. Assassin's Creed, which opened in China the same day as Resident Evil, cost $125 million and starred the red-hot Michael Fassbender alongside Oscar winner Marion Cotillard. It flopped too — just over $54 million in the U.S., and a pitiful 18% on Rotten Tomatoes.

By Hollywood's own logic, this makes no sense. That logic runs: if movies can be turned into comics, TV shows, cartoons, toys and games, the reverse should work just as well.

There is no shortage of proof. Marvel's superhero comics became a cinematic universe. Hasbro's Transformers toys became Michael Bay blockbusters that grossed more than $3 billion worldwide.

Only video game movies have been a complete disaster — and the games they drew on include classics like Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia and Warcraft. Hollywood, the most advanced film industry in the world, has never managed to turn a first-rate video game into a movie that critics and audiences both liked.

The stranger question: 25 years have passed since Super Mario Bros. in 1993. From Street Fighter to Tomb Raider, from Prince of Persia to Assassin's Creed — why does Hollywood show no sign of stopping, and instead keep making one video game movie after another?

Everything starts with a good intention, and video game movies were no exception.

The 1980s were an exciting decade for the American game industry. The first home console, launched by Atari in 1975, made the market expand fast, and seven years later the revenue of the U.S. game industry passed the combined take of pop music and the Hollywood box office.

Americans briefly walked away from games in 1985, buried under too many bad ones, but in 1987 Nintendo rekindled their enthusiasm with Super Mario and the NES. By the 1990s the NES had sold 27.59 million units and held 90% of the American home console market.

It was that unprecedented success that turned Hollywood's attention to video games, and put the idea of adapting them into someone's head.

Hollywood had long been in the habit of adapting classic literature, best-selling novels and popular comics. There were plenty of successes: The Godfather, now a classic, came from the best-selling novel of the same name, and Batman was the top-grossing film in North America in 1989.

If novels and comics could become movies, why not games? That was probably Hollywood's thinking at the time.

The first game Hollywood picked was, naturally, Super Mario. According to a report in Wired, several studios were racing one another to get the rights from Nintendo. Independent filmmaker Roland Joffe won them over.

In 1993, Super Mario Bros. reached theaters, and audiences were immediately stunned by how bad it was. In the game, Bowser is at least a cute, dopey green turtle. In the movie he became a horned, long-tongued weirdo of a man.

The plot was harder to sit through. Read the reviews of these films on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes and you find both ordinary viewers and professional critics aiming at the story, as Washington Post writer Hal Hinson complained in his 1993 review: "The story is almost entirely beside the point of this movie."

Barry Morrow may have been the first to see that a good game cannot be turned into a good story. In 1988 the screenplay he wrote, Rain Man, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Yet the Super Mario Bros. script gave him a headache: "Starting from just a concept and a name, it's very hard to build a complete story out of the thin characters found in a video game." In the end he walked away from the film.

Think back on the game Super Mario and it is easy to understand how he felt. All a player does is jump over obstacles, stomp mushrooms, crawl through pipes and collect coins. Only at the end of an underground level, when an NPC pops up to say the princess isn't there, does the player realize this is a story about a hero rescuing a princess.

And that is all it is. "A hero rescues a princess" cannot carry a two-hour commercial genre film. The characters' personalities and motives, the turns of the rescue — all of it is blank. Writing a script from the game Super Mario meant writing an entirely new script from scratch.

This is exactly the difficulty of adapting a game into a movie.

Games themselves don't lean on narrative. In a fighting game like Street Fighter, what a player wants is the smooth, satisfying feel of landing a critical hit. In a real-time strategy game like Warcraft, commanding armies to take cities comes first. Even in role-playing games, which care most about story, most of a player's attention goes to the action — steering Lara through her acrobatics in Tomb Raider, or the hero's "leap of faith" in Assassin's Creed — and the story itself matters far less.

Movies are the opposite. Today's Hollywood commercial genre film puts plot above everything, and driving the story through changes in a character's motives has become the highest law of Hollywood screenwriting. Everything else — cinematography, color, lighting, score, costume and makeup — goes largely unnoticed by ordinary audiences as long as it isn't absurd.

Notice something? One word keeps coming back when you describe how games treat story: "steering." It is that sense of interaction between player and game that leads to a different approach to plot. When a game's story stalls, it hands the player the controls and keeps their interest alive. When a movie's plot stalls, there is nothing to interact with, and attention drifts.

"There's a very simple reason video game movies fail: they have no interactivity," said Wheeler Dixon, a film studies professor at the University of Nebraska.

So even though many games have wildly imaginative worlds, their plots are often borrowed from the simplest stories in film and literature — personal revenge, saving the world — to appeal to as many players as possible. A game may run for hours or even dozens of hours, and its story is still far thinner than that of a two-hour movie.

That is the awkward spot many films land in when they lift a game's story straight onto the big screen. Assassin's Creed is the obvious example: outside the game's context, the main story looks even more ordinary, even hackneyed. Add the exaggerated settings games favor, and ordinary audiences can't help but cringe at phrases like "the centuries-old war between the Assassins and the Templars" or "the sacred Apple of Eden."

Worse still: with no say in what happens, pinned to their seats watching a paper-thin hero go on an adventure, audiences feel a distance, the sense that someone else is at the controls. As American critic Roger Ebert wrote of Doom, a game movie stripped of playability is incomplete: "I have never played the game, but now I know what it feels like not to play it. The experience is like having a kid take your computer away and refuse to let you play."

The failure of Super Mario Bros. did not stop Hollywood from developing more video game movies.

In 1994, director Paul W.S. Anderson, then not yet 30, set out to adapt Mortal Kombat. Shooting began that August, wrapped in December, and the film opened the following August. Ask Anderson whether he worried about script trouble when adapting a game and his answer would probably be that he didn't care about the plot at all.

The film, released in China as 《格斗之王》, or "King of Combat," did indeed have a terrible plot. "The film is dragged down by its dumb plot," reads Rotten Tomatoes' consensus, which scores it at just 34%. Yet Mortal Kombat did surprisingly well at the box office: $122 million worldwide against a budget of only $12 million, practically a windfall.

It succeeded precisely because Anderson didn't care about the plot. What this young director did best was give a film a heavy B-movie and cult-movie flavor. Neither term has a precise or agreed definition, but here they can be taken to mean violent, strange and sinister. All of that is in the film.

B-movies and cult movies were beneath Hollywood's notice. The orthodox Hollywood genre film, as it grew out of the 1930s, meant musicals, gangster pictures, Westerns, epics and war films. Horror and action got only small budgets in the 1960s, so they were usually cheaply made, with thin stories.

But it was exactly their sloppiness, and a character so unlike that of big-budget films, that won B-movies a loyal following. When those fans' enthusiasm boiled over, you got a box-office explosion like Mortal Kombat. And in turn Anderson used Mortal Kombat to show video game movies a way forward: make them B-movies and cult movies.

Anderson himself followed that path faithfully. Taking on the Resident Evil adaptation in 2002, he threw out the game's plot entirely, borrowed only the broad setting and a few concepts, and folded in his own taste for gore, zombies and action, turning the film into a Paul W.S. Anderson zombie movie.

Stringing a film together with fight scenes and ignoring the story was never going to please professional critics. By 2017 Resident Evil had reached its sixth installment, and the best Rotten Tomatoes score any of the six managed was under 35.

But Anderson didn't care about critics either: "People watch my movies, they cheer, they applaud — I want to make the kind of movie they want to see." Audiences repaid him well enough. The Resident Evil series, with total investment of around $300 million, took more than $1.16 billion worldwide. Among video game movies, that counts as a miracle.

Silent Hill, adapted in 2006 from the horror game of the same name, handled atmosphere and dread skillfully enough to take $100 million worldwide. And 2007's Hitman, packed with blood and violence that gave it a B-movie texture, earned $100 million worldwide on a small budget of just over $20 million.

B-movies and cult movies looked like a way out for video game movies. That is also why Hollywood kept making them knowing they were disliked. If people want to watch, why not try?

But only small and midsize studios were willing to make B-movies; the Big Six looked down on that tier. In today's Hollywood only A-list productions costing hundreds of millions return the fattest profits. If the Big Six wanted a piece of the game market, their only route was to make video game movies into blockbusters.

In 2001 Paramount became the first to try, with Eidos's flagship, Tomb Raider. It is not that Paramount took the project lightly: the investors put in $113 million between them and cast Angelina Jolie, then a top-tier star, hoping for a female Indiana Jones.

Unfortunately, once a video game movie loses its B-movie flavor, it can no longer shrug off the script the way Resident Evil did, and the gap between games and movies reappears. Tomb Raider was badly received: ordinary viewers called it hollow and illogical, while players protested that Lara looked nothing like the character in the game.

The film grossed $274 million worldwide, but against a $113 million budget it is hard to say that pleased Paramount and its co-investors. The Lord of the Rings, released the same year, turned a $93 million budget into $870 million worldwide.

Hollywood still didn't give up. For an industry built on big money and big risk, a game's ready-made fan base was too valuable to abandon, so after Tomb Raider there were several more attempts.

All of them failed. In 2003 Paramount put out Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, with the budget cut to $95 million — but the box office shrank further, to $156 million. In 2010 Disney launched Prince of Persia, and not even Jake Gyllenhaal could rescue its dismal plot; on a reported $200 million budget it grossed only $336 million worldwide.

Even though no video game movie truly won over the past two decades and more, there are no fewer of them today. There are more. In 2016 alone we got four: Ratchet & Clank, The Angry Birds Movie, Warcraft and Assassin's Creed. More are coming: a new Tomb Raider, Minecraft, Uncharted and others.

Some of these Hollywood went looking for. Warner Bros. bought the rights to Minecraft and handed production to Roy Lee, the producer of The Lego Movie.

From Hollywood's side, besides the unchanged twenty-year hope of turning gamers into moviegoers, the industry has run short of ideas in the past couple of years. Sequel after sequel has arrived without stirring much audience interest, until video game movies — never very successful — became material Hollywood wanted to fight over.

That is not the whole story. Game companies are every bit as eager. Rather than passively selling adaptation rights as they once did, they have begun to take charge.

Blizzard set up its own film division in 2015, giving it a say over adaptations of the Call of Duty series. Ubisoft founded its own film studio back in 2011, with a slate that includes not only Assassin's Creed but the Tom Clancy games and Far Cry. And Rovio, which claimed on the strength of Angry Birds that it would become the Disney of Finland, put out plans for a whole Angry Birds film series.

How should we read this hurry to make movies? For one thing, movies really are a big pie and they want a slice. A film's audience is also always far larger than a game's — an AAA game that sells a million copies is doing well, while a movie routinely reaches tens of millions or more. Game companies need more consumers to build their own brand.

More important, though, may be the sense of crisis at big traditional game companies like Ubisoft and Blizzard. Players have changed. A standard gamer used to own at least one console and to have played at least one large 3D game. Now, most of the time, all they need is a computer, or even just a phone. In the United States more than half the population plays mobile games, and more than a third of those players spend over nine hours a week doing it.

So game companies must either pivot to mobile games and reach more players, or, if they want to keep making AAA games while that audience shrinks, find new revenue for those AAA titles. Turning them into movies at least sounds like a decent idea.

The result is that video game movies have never been this crowded a business: Hollywood is in it, and now the game companies are too.

Will they get what they want?

On the bright side, the openings for video game movies seem to be multiplying. Of Warcraft's $433 million worldwide gross, $220 million came from China. As of yesterday, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter had passed 800 million yuan. Given the potential of the Chinese market, both game companies and Hollywood can afford to tolerate more failure.

Game companies also believe they have found a way to close the storytelling gap between games and movies. Jean-Julien Baronnet, former CEO of Ubisoft Motion Pictures, said so confidently: "Adaptation also requires a deep understanding of a game's values and its creative process. The key is to work with the game's designers on the creative side, to find, from an artistic point of view, the elements of the game's DNA that fit film best. The key is to respect the players' passion — they have spent hundreds of hours in that world, so keeping it as accurate as possible is essential."

But does bringing game designers deeper into filmmaking actually fix the script? A few sentences from Baronnet hardly count as a satisfying answer.

Which probably brings The Angry Birds Movie to mind, a project Rovio was involved in more deeply, perhaps, than any game company before it. Rotten Tomatoes' consensus does read: "The Angry Birds Movie is more fun than an adaptation of a mobile app has any right to be." But its score is still only 43, and fewer than half of the audience said they liked it.

Illustrations: Feng Xiuxia