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It’s been obvious for a while now that Hollywood is hoping to position video game adaptations as its next big meal ticket, but — in an industry that’s always braced for failure and blindsided by success — the blockbuster opening weekend of “A Minecraft Movie” still managed to take everyone by surprise. Even Warner Bros. seemed to be caught flat-footed by its own sudden windfall, as if the studio’s recent failure to make any money off a mega-budget space fascism satire from Bong Joon Ho and/or the imminent dread it feels about selling the masses on an $115 million action film inspired by a Thomas Pynchon novel somehow meant that a manic kids movie based on the best-selling video game of all time might result in another round of embarrassing headlines.
Still, I can understand why there might have been a little trepidation around a project that, in hindsight, was always going to be a major event. Sure, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and the “Sonic the Hedgehog” franchise had already combined to gross more than two billion dollars, but the last time someone plugged Jack Black into one of these things we got “Borderlands,” which didn’t even make one billion dollars, and was almost as bad at resembling its video game as Elon Musk probably is at playing it. Further muddying the waters was the fact that “Minecraft” is a plotless sandbox that hinges on the joys of unfettered creativity, while “A Minecraft Movie” is a hyper-linear hero’s journey that doesn’t have a single fresh idea of its own.
Experiencing the final product at a pre-release press screening with my five-year-old son (who spent most of the movie beating me to death with the blocky foam swords they gave him on the way in), I wasn’t entirely convinced that projecting “Minecraft” graphics onto a generic adventure story would be enough to satisfy the game’s fanbase, or to sell its concept on a wider audience. And judging by the tepid response to that screening (which, unlike the average showing of “A Minecraft Movie,” did not descend into “mother!”-like pandemonium at the sight of a square-headed zombie child riding a big chicken), I certainly wouldn’t have suspected that “A Minecraft Movie” was about to signal a major paradigm shift in the film industry’s priorities.
On the contrary, as I watched Jason Momoa and co. speed through a paint-by-numbers plot so unashamedly mashed together from “The Lord of the Rings” and “The LEGO Movie” that WB might have to sue itself, all I could think about was that Hollywood still has no idea how to make a video game movie. It wasn’t until I watched the box office numbers roll in that I started to think about how exciting that could be now that Hollywood is about to be making a lot more of them.
It might be premature to declare that video game adaptations have become the new superhero movies, but something will have to be in order for Hollywood to move on, as the film business would be lost without a well it can’t wait to tap dry (as box office quote machine Paul Dergarabedian confirmed to IndieWire earlier this week). Studio execs may never be able to find another licensing machine as elastic, reliable, and self-perpetuating as the MCU, but the success of recent video game movies at least seems more replicable than that of other sensations like “Oppenheimer” (there’s a reason why Paramount barely waited until the weekend was over to announce “The Angry Birds 3,” but Universal still hasn’t cleared its summer schedule for a star-studded biopic about Niels Bohr).
It doesn’t hurt that video game adaptations also come pre-installed with a more enthusiastic fanbase than movies based on board games and other toys, nor that most of them are reverse-engineered from recognizable fantasy worlds rather than from specific plots, which allows the genre to avoid the tedious fidelity of live-action remakes. Theater etiquette notwithstanding, I’ll take a fan servicey moment of recognition like the chicken jockey scene over an entire film that feels like enshittified déjà vu.
All of which is to say that if I were Donna Langley right now, I’d be racing to build out the Super Mario Bros. Cinematic Universe (and using the billions I’d make at the box office to support a full slate of auteur-driven original films because I am a good Warrior of Cinema who would like to see heaven someday). I’d be standing in front of a Powerpoint presentation that maps out our release plans for a “Super Smash Bros.” epic modeled after Jean-Claude Van Damme tournament fighter classics like “Bloodsport,” a “Donkey Kong” comedy about class warfare, and an 150cc “Mario Kart” bonanza that promises to blue shell the “Fast & Furious” franchise into a pit so deep not even Lakitu could ever hope to fish it out.
Of course, there are only so many beloved video game franchises that lend themselves to that kind of Marvelous thinking — not enough to let Hollywood run these properties into the ground on auto-pilot. With superhero movies slowing down and studios desperate for product, the film industry will likely feel pressured to create video game adaptations faster than they can figure out the safest and least interesting way of doing so. Best case scenario: The creative uncertainty that made video game movies a liability for so long will be complemented — but not replaced — by the urgency with which Hollywood is going to to start making them.
In a lot of cases, that’s not going to go well. Despite the fact that Hollywood is throwing a lot more talent and money at these movies than they have in the past, it’s possible — probable, even — that many of them will continue to suck as bad as “Hitman” or “Uncharted.” What excites me, after a decade and change of writing virtually the same review for every superhero film that was shoved down our gullets, is my suspicion that these movies will at least have the potential to suck in different and sometimes wildly unexpected ways.
Of course, if the unique creative freedom that video game movies are still afforded gives me reason to hope that some of them might be worth seeing, it also helps to explain why so many of them have been so bad for so long. As “The Last of Us” showrunner Craig Mazin told me a few years ago: “Movies are not a particularly good medium for video game stories, and it would be folly to try and reproduce the enjoyment of playing them as a passive experience.” (His solution: TV). It’s a conundrum that Hollywood has been wrestling with for decades, and — with a few very qualified exceptions — has only been able to solve in the context of high-energy kids fare.
If the success of “A Minecraft Movie” has broader implications than that of the “Super Mario Bros.” cartoon, however, that’s because it was able to create something out of nothing; or, overcoming a challenge similar to the one faced by Amazon’s upcoming “The Sims” adaptation, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was able to create something out of everything. By sledge-hammering a broad comedy from the bones of its source material’s singular brand aesthetic, “Minecraft” proved that a high-concept “Barbie” approach can still pay off in the absence of precious resources like wit and vision. To the same end, it also proved that the weakness or non-existence of video game stories, which has vexed screenwriters from “Double Dragon” to “Need for Speed,” has the potential to be more of a feature than a bug.
But the real opportunity for creativity might stem from the adaptations that are rooted in a more specific narrative of atmospheric experience. I’d be lying if I said I’ve ever felt the need for a “Death Stranding” movie, especially as Hideo Kojima’s schlepping simulator was such a cinematic feat to begin with, but my abject inability to picture what A24 and “Pig” director Michael Sarnoski might do with the idea only makes me more excited to see them try. By the same token, I struggle to imagine how Wes Ball’s live-action “The Legend of Zelda” movie will be able to capture the transcendent magic of its source material, but that’s all the more reason to let him experiment with it. Ditto the “Split Fiction” and “Vampire Survivor” adaptations that Story Kitchen just scooped up the rights to make, or the “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” adaptation they’ve already put into motion even though the game itself has still yet to be released.
None of these films will resemble one another, and — in stark contrast to the various installments of an interconnected superhero franchise — the success of each one won’t have a direct impact on the fortunes of the next, even if all of them are bound together by their perceived viability. Mathieu Turi’s imminent “Watch Dogs” might have been greenlit because video games have become widely accepted as valid source material, but it will have to stand on its own two feet in a way that “Ant-Man” never did.
Where “Captain America: Winter Soldier” became a punchline for claiming to be a conspiracy thriller, and where “Logan” was mocked for fronting as a Western even though it was very much a superhero saga at heart, the “Portal” movie that J.J. Abrams is flirting with really would have to be a brain-bending piece of hard sci-fi, while any hypothetical “Red Dead Redemption” adaptation could only hope to succeed by actually embodying the cowboy ethos that “Logan” could only glance at in between other obligations.
As much as video games have struggled to circumvent the reality that most of them boil down to shooting things, video game movies are tethered to so many different genres that it would be impossible to pump them out on the same kind of assembly line that has been clogging theaters with capeshit since 2008. Video game movies aren’t held in place by spandex — there’s a different kind of flexibility to them, and more room to stretch the movies towards new places. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen, but the remote possibility that it might is enough to make me happy that superheroes aren’t going to be seen as multiplex cinema’s only saviors anymore, or even as its most powerful allies. After all, a chicken jockey only has a 0.25 percent chance of appearing in “Minecraft” if no chickens are nearby (a fact I definitely knew offhand and didn’t have to google “what is the chicken jockey?” in order to find out), but I suppose that’s all the more reason for people to buy a ticket and see something the movies have never shown them before.
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