“Chicken jockey!” was a rallying cry.
Theaters erupted when Jack Black’s character uttered that gaming lingo in last year’s “A Minecraft Movie.” Fans clambered onto one another’s shoulders. Police officers escorted out the rowdiest disrupters. In at least one screening, someone smuggled in a live chicken.
The mayhem was a symbol of the potential payoff when gamers see the tiniest details of their favorite franchises lovingly presented on the big screen. While movie studios have adapted video games for decades — with varying degrees of success — the recent box-office triumphs of films like “A Minecraft Movie” ($961 million), “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” ($1.36 billion) and the cult horror “Five Nights at Freddy’s” ($292 million) have Hollywood excitedly raiding a treasure chest of intellectual property.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” opens in theaters this week, with new films in the Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil and Street Fighter universes also coming this year. The feature debuts of two megafranchises, the first-person shooter Call of Duty and the fantasy epic The Legend of Zelda, are in development with prominent directors. And even niche indie games like the neo-noir vampire mystery El Paso, Elsewhere are being snapped up for scripts.
But video game adaptations can still flop, and it has become clear that flourishing requires appealing to a game’s native audience.
Zach Cregger, who is directing this year’s “Resident Evil” after breaking through with “Barbarian” and “Weapons,” said in an email that he warily crosses his arms whenever he hears of a project inspired by a game he loves.
“I’m like, ‘Don’t ruin this for me,’” Cregger said.
Video game adaptations may be a life raft for the movie industry, whose audiences have not returned in prepandemic numbers because of the convenience of streaming. Blockbusters are more important than ever, even as interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has waned.
“It’s not like Hollywood discovered games, it’s that games became bigger than Hollywood,” said Derek Douglas, the head of Creative Artists Agency’s game division.
The video game industry was valued at $184 billion in 2023, according to the International Trade Administration, while analysts say the global box office that year was about $34 billion.
The financial stakes make Dmitri Johnson, a producer on the “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies, worried about executives who might commission video game projects without truly appreciating what fans want to see.
“The thing that keeps me up at night is the wrong people doing this and seeing the shiny objects,” said Johnson, a co-founder of Story Kitchen, a production company that focuses on video game adaptations.
When Paramount in 2019 put out its opening trailer for the first live-action “Sonic the Hedgehog,” fans decried the blue-haired speedster’s appearance. Two days later, Jeff Fowler, the movie’s director, posted on social media: “The message is loud and clear… you aren’t happy with the design & you want changes. It’s going to happen.”
The studio enlarged the character’s eyes and further edited his facial features to better resemble his signature cartoonlike look that was established on Sega consoles in the 1990s. The movie ended up a hit, grossing $320 million worldwide.
“I think that is a pivotal turning point in that studio and game relationship of, ‘We’re good at what we do, you’re good at what you do, but sometimes, maybe, there’s something in the middle,’” Johnson said.
Video game movies were once considered cursed. In 1993, the live-action “Super Mario Bros.” did not break even on its $48 million budget. Critics derided its realistic and gritty approach, the opposite of the lively and joyful tone of the colorful Nintendo games.
Three decades later, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” became one of the highest-performing animated movies of all time. The vibrant colors and fast-paced action — along with Black playing the role of the villain Bowser with brio — resonated across generations.
Dillon Thorp, the owner of a video game store in a Los Angeles suburb, said that movie accurately captured the aesthetic of the games.
“I feel like Mario was treated as if he was Mario,” Thorp said.
Nintendo and Illumination Entertainment, the animation studio behind the modern Super Mario movies, declined to comment about their approach to the franchise.
There may be greater fidelity to popular franchises now, as emerging filmmakers who grew up playing them reach positions of power. Cregger, 45, said he wanted to create a “Resident Evil” film that honored the franchise’s intense games, in which players must solve puzzles and survive a nightmarish zombie-infested setting with sparse resources.
“I love the idea of being pitted against a world that is hellbent on annihilating you,” Cregger said. “It just feels fun and I haven’t seen a movie that offers that sort of experience.”
Cregger added that if elements of his movie deviate from the game franchise’s lore, he anticipates that some fans will “crucify” him.
Video game adaptations are not guaranteed hits: This year’s “Return to Silent Hill” made only $5.5 million domestically and was panned by critics.
The most high-profile recent failure was “Borderlands,” the 2024 adaptation of an uncouth looter shooter. The star-laden cast of Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis and Black — who voiced the robot Claptrap — required a budget of more than $100 million, with the movie grossing about a third of that globally. Critics condemned the film for dampening the overtly violent tone and dark humor of the game franchise in pursuit of a more mainstream audience.
Alden Dalia, a motion picture executive for the talent agency WME, said game studios could be sensitive to fan responses because adaptations are also marketing vehicles. Sales of games in the nuclear postapocalyptic Fallout franchise increased, according to online sales data, after the success of the television series on Amazon Prime Video.
Asad Qizilbash, the head of PlayStation Productions, said Sony created its game-specific subsidiary in 2019 after seeing the success of Marvel’s comic book films.
“The Last of Us” and “God of War” were initially conceptualized as movies before becoming television shows, where showrunners can stretch story lines in their immersive worlds across episodic seasons. Action-centric games with strong characters translate well to movies, said Qizilbash, pointing to the treasure-hunting adventure “Uncharted” (2022), which starred Tom Holland and brought in $407 million.
“For us it’s, ‘Is it a really good character that people can root for?’ Qizilbash said. “‘Is it really an interesting world that people want to lose themselves in and explore?’”
In both movie and TV adaptations, it is the details that matter.
Experts said “The Last of Us,” a violent look at a zombified civilization, had been a hit for HBO because it was largely faithful to the source material, with multiple scenes that were directly translated from the games. When Sony and Amazon Prime posted a set photo from the forthcoming “God of War,” fans complained that the mythological protagonist Kratos was not intimidating enough.
Tom Ara, an entertainment lawyer who advised on the upcoming “Angry Birds 3” movie, said that game adaptations that enrage their fan base often have generic scripts by studios that treat the intellectual property “like a logo.”
“You have to stay true to the story,” Ara said, “and if you start screwing around with it, they will burn you and they will skewer you.”
Emmanuel Morgan reports on sports, pop culture and entertainment.
The post As Hollywood Courts Gamers, They Warn: ‘Don’t Ruin This’ appeared first on New York Times.
