The best and worst movies adapted from video games

Many movies have been based on books and TV shows. On at least one occasion, a film has been based on a Twitter thread (shout out to Zola). Then, there are the movies based on video games. If there is one world of adaptation that gets a bad reputation, it’s video-game adaptations. Honestly, that’s fair. Many of these movies are truly bad. That being said, a few are good, or at least decent. Here are the best and worst movies based on video games, though those concepts are being graded on very different curves.

The first video-game adaption was, sensibly, an adaptation of Super Mario. Mario was the biggest video game character in the world then, and he still is. So, how did this movie end up as such a disaster? Even star Bob Hoskins (yes, Bob Hoskins played Mario) despised the film. Super Mario Brothers was a total disaster, setting video-game adaptation back years. Maybe the 2023 version starring Chris Pratt will be better.

A bad Street Fighter movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme is one thing. It happens. A dumb martial arts movie starring JCVD is a very 1990s thing. What bums us out is Raul Julia’s turn as M. Bison was his final film role. He died before the movie came out. Fortunately, these days, we can remember him as Gomez Addams and forget about Street Fighter.

This movie was made in 1999, so naturally, it starred Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard. Hey, it would be good enough for Scooby-Doo, so it was good enough for this forgotten adaptation of Wing Commander. It made a mere $11 million on a $30 million budget and has been shrugged off by the world.

Milla Jovovich starred in several movies based on the popular Resident Evil series. All in all, the series has a solid reputation with people who love action-horror films and don’t need a ton more than gross monsters and fight scenes. Resident Evil falls on the "best" side because it's the first movie in the series and has the most meat on the bone. Plus, it has the best Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics and fans.

And we follow up (faint) praise to Resident Evil by slagging off the first sequel. Before the series found its groove as C+-level monster movies, it lost the plot with Apocalypse. Much as how the first movie is the consensus best movie in the series based on critics and fans, this is the consensus worst of the bunch.

When Dwayne Johnson was trying to become a movie star and still trafficked on “The Rock” persona, he got to star in Doom. Taking a first-person shooter and turning it into a movie seems daunting, and it turns out it is. The movie is not the worst on the list, but Doom has nothing going for it.

Uwe Boll is the Ed Wood of video-game movies, and it’s not even a revered genre. Considered by many as one of the worst living directors, he’s made a few truly awful movies based on video games. The one we are using to represent Boll is BloodRayne, possibly his worst but most notable.

Starring in Hitman made Timothy Olyphant completely rethink his career. That says it all. Olyphant is a really good actor, and in shows like Justified, he has shown he can do this kind of role well. He’s not to blame for this woeful movie, arguably the nadir of Olyphant’s career.

Max Payne and Hitman have similar vibes. The former also got Mark Wahlberg as the star post- The Departed. Wahlberg was on the rise. However, this movie is unremarkable. It’s a lousy revenge thriller that would feel like total cookie-cutter storytelling if you didn’t know it was adapted from a video game.

We had to do a second Street Fighter movie because this one is even worse than the 1994 film. In fact, it’s one of the all-time terrible video-game adaptations. Honestly, it’s in the running for one of the worst movies of the new millennium. It carries a five-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and completely flopped at the box office.

Even if we overlook the fact Jake Gyllenhaal is playing a character literally known as the Prince of Persia, this movie would be one of the worst here. Gyllenhaal is an actor who is at his best doing character work and being weird. He’s not a generic action star. He was terribly miscast in this film in multiple ways, though nobody could save this from being a flop.

We aren’t giving Need for Speed any Oscars. However, it delivered what we expected. It’s a decent racing movie that kept our attention. It gave Aaron Paul a chance to be a lead actor in a film and let Michael Keaton be weird. That made it fun enough for us.

The Warcraft universe of video games is immensely popular. World of Warcraft was a legitimate phenomenon. And yet, did you even know Warcraft came out? While he made good money, that was almost entirely due to its popularity overseas. Warcraft made $439 worldwide but only $47.4 million in the United States. Money doesn’t equal quality, of course. This was a murky slog that few had the patience for.

A few times, we said that films were barely considered "best." Here’s a movie at the upper echelon of “worst.” It’s not good. At all. That said, it’s hard for a movie starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard to be all bad. If you feel like we’ve been negative, fret not. This is the last “worst” on the list. It’s all positive from here!

Angelina Jolie starred as Lara Croft in two  Tomb Raider movies that were too mediocre to qualify on either side of this dichotomy. Then, we got a reboot with Alicia Vikander as Lara. This movie is genuinely good. It’s a solid action film with a fun villain in Walton Goggins. Vikander gives her all as Lara. Hey, Croft is kind of a buxom Indiana Jones. Why wouldn’t a movie about her work?

Dwayne Johnson is back with giant animals. Apparently, that works better than a giant gun. The Rampage game has almost no plot. The plot in the movie is sometimes silly. However, there are those giant animals! By this point, Johnson had settled into being a movie star, which goes a long way.

Look, when we saw Pikachu in a detective’s hat voiced by Ryan Reynolds, we were skeptical. Then, we heard Detective Pikachu was pretty good. We bit, and we did not regret it. The world they built for Detective Pikachu is robust and fun to spend time in. Also, Reynolds isn’t as annoying as you might expect. 

We did not expect this before this movie came out. The Angry Birds Movie is entirely mediocre. The Angry Birds 2 is one of the most critically successful video-game adaptations. No, really. It has a 72 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating. That’s better than any English-language video-game movie aside from the small indie comedy Werewolves Within. We don’t know how this movie managed to work, but it did.

Yes, Sonic the Hedgehog became a joke on the internet after that first trailer. Sure, the original Sonic design had creepy teeth. These things happen. In the end, Sonic the Hedgehog was a perfectly fine movie. Sonic looked fine. Jim Carrey chewed the scenery in a wonderful way. It was successful enough to get a sequel; this time, there wasn’t any weird stuff about character design.

They made a Mortal Kombat movie in 1995. It’s PG-13. They decided to reboot Mortal Kombat in 2021. It’s R-rated, and that makes all the difference. This version of the story gives us the violence and gore one expects from the world of Mortal Kombat. We wanted a movie that called to mind the video game that freaked out parents in the ‘90s. We got it, and it made us happy.