For almost thirty years, “video game movie” was a byword for failure. Adaptations were rushed, tonally confused and routinely dismissed by critics, to the point where a genuine “video game movie curse” became conventional wisdom in Hollywood. That consensus collapsed in the 2020s, when a run of family films and prestige television turned game properties into some of the most reliable money-makers and most acclaimed shows in the business. The arc from the live-action Super Mario Bros. of 1993 to the billion-dollar animated Mario film of 2023 is one of the clearest reversals of fortune in modern entertainment.
Before the Adaptations: Games at the Movies
Films engaged with gaming before they tried to adapt it. Disney’s Tron (1982) drew its visual world from arcade culture and computer graphics without being based on any single game, and its tie-in arcade cabinet reportedly out-earned the film itself. The most direct early example of gaming on screen was The Wizard (1989), a road movie built around a video game tournament that doubled as a feature-length advertisement, introducing North American audiences to Super Mario Bros. 3 and the Power Glove peripheral. Both films belong to the wider 1980s and 1990s gaming culture they emerged from, an era whose hardware is catalogued in the overview of 1980s game consoles.
The Curse Years
The first wave of true adaptations established the curse. The live-action Super Mario Bros. (1993), directed by the pair Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, took a colourful platformer and turned it into a grim dystopian fantasy; on a budget near $42 million it grossed under $39 million and became a textbook flop, though it later acquired a cult following.
The picture was not uniformly bleak. Mortal Kombat (1995), directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, grossed around $122 million worldwide and topped the United States box office for three weeks, arguably the first commercially successful adaptation. Its driving electronic theme and tournament structure mapped cleanly onto the source game, a fidelity the Mario film had abandoned. The Street Fighter film (1994) with Jean-Claude Van Damme was a critical punchline but also made money, earning close to $100 million worldwide — its reputation problem was artistic, not financial. The lesson, largely ignored at the time, was that adaptations succeeded commercially when they respected the tone and structure of the games rather than overwriting them.
The curse hardened with a later run of poorly received films, most infamously the adaptations directed by Uwe Boll — House of the Dead (2003), Alone in the Dark (2005) and BloodRayne (2005) — which became shorthand for the genre’s worst tendencies. Wing Commander (1999), directed by the game’s own creator Chris Roberts, was a separate critical and commercial disappointment.
A Partial Thaw in the 2000s and 2010s
Even during the curse years, a few franchises proved that game adaptations could draw an audience. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), starring Angelina Jolie, grossed around $274 million worldwide and set a then-record for the genre. The Resident Evil series (2002 to 2016), with Milla Jovovich and again driven by Paul W.S. Anderson, ran to six films and a cumulative gross of roughly $1.2 billion, long the highest-earning video game film franchise.
The 2010s were a mixed period. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) grossed around $336 million but struggled against a heavy budget. Warcraft (2016) earned about $439 million worldwide, the bulk of it from a record-breaking opening in China, while underperforming in North America. Assassin’s Creed (2016), starring Michael Fassbender, was regarded as an underperformer. The pattern was clear: adaptations could find an audience, but rarely the critics.
The decade also exposed a structural problem. Films like Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed carried blockbuster budgets that demanded a global audience far larger than the games’ existing fanbase, yet they leaned heavily on lore that newcomers found impenetrable. The result was a recurring mismatch: stories dense enough to satisfy players but obscure enough to alienate everyone else. The adaptations that eventually broke through in the 2020s solved this by choosing properties with simple, broadly familiar premises — a plumber, a blue hedgehog, a haunted pizza restaurant — that needed no prior knowledge to enjoy.
The Modern Adaptation Boom
The decisive break came at the end of the decade. Detective Pikachu (2019) grossed around $433 million and showed that a faithful, affectionate tone, combined with photorealistic creature design, could win over both fans and families. The Sonic the Hedgehog film (2020) became as famous for its production story as its box office: backlash against the character’s unsettling original design forced the studio to delay the release and redesign Sonic entirely. The gamble paid off, with around $320 million worldwide, followed by Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) at roughly $405 million and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024) near $492 million, the strongest entry in the series.
The boom peaked with The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), produced by Illumination and Nintendo, with Chris Pratt voicing Mario. It became the first video game film to pass $1 billion, closing near $1.36 billion worldwide and ranking among the highest-grossing animated films of all time — a striking redemption for the property whose 1993 adaptation had defined the curse. Crucially, Nintendo took an active production role rather than merely licensing the characters, a level of involvement the company had refused thirty years earlier. The horror film Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023) added another model, earning around $297 million on a simultaneous theatrical and streaming release and becoming Blumhouse’s biggest hit, while A Minecraft Movie (2025) grossed roughly $961 million worldwide. Together these films demonstrated that game adaptations could anchor every part of the release calendar, from animated family event to horror sleeper to four-quadrant blockbuster.
Television Finds the Form
The most artistically significant shift happened on television, where longer running times suited games’ deeper narratives. A two-hour film has to compress a sprawling game into a single arc; a multi-season series can give that material the room it was designed for. Netflix’s Castlevania (2017 to 2021) demonstrated that animation could treat game lore seriously and build a faithful adult audience, and Arcane (2021), based on League of Legends, won the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program after its premiere — recognition from outside the gaming world that the form had matured.
Live action followed. HBO’s The Last of Us (2023), adapted from the Naughty Dog game, drew widespread critical acclaim and 24 Emmy nominations, a level of recognition no live-action game adaptation had previously reached. Amazon’s Fallout (2024) was a critical and commercial success that was quickly renewed. Netflix’s The Witcher (2019), though based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels, owed much of its mainstream audience to the popularity of the games. The longest-running adaptation of all remains the Pokémon anime, which debuted in Japan in 1997 and has run for well over a thousand episodes.
Why the Curse Broke
Several factors converged to end the curse. Studios began collaborating closely with the original developers and rights-holders rather than working around them, so adaptations respected the source tone instead of replacing it. Visual-effects and animation budgets grew large enough to render fantastical worlds convincingly. And streaming gave narrative-heavy games the episode count they needed. The audience, too, had changed: the children who grew up with the consoles of the 1990s were now the adults buying tickets, and the cultural literacy that made these stories legible is part of the broader place of video games in pop culture. The hardware that hosted the original games is catalogued in the wider history of video game consoles, but the films and series they inspired now stand as cultural works in their own right.