Do video game movies objectively suck? Certainly I can cough up a half dozen examples for you, but I prefer a little objectivity. Video games, after all, are just another form of adaptation. We’ve been adapting books into movies for about a hundred years now. We’ve been making movies out of comic books since the 40’s and based on TV shows since the 60’s and video games only since the 90’s.

The general feeling toward video game movies is that they’ve all been pretty bad. Some have been commercially successful, but never has one been nominated for a major film award, though a few have been nominated for Saturn Awards mostly for costuming, and several have earned Razzies.

But it just isn’t enough for me simply to say there are a lot of bad video game adaptations out there. I can’t claim to have seen them all so who am I to make a generalization? So, in true nerd fashion, I’ve assembled some data. Before I geek out too hard on numbers I must do the pseudo-scientific thing and disclose a bit about my methodology: bullet point style!

• I compiled data from Wikipedia, Metacritic and Boxoffice Mojo.
• This list of video game movies is pruned to include basically just the films you consider “video game movies”, not shorts or tie-in products made by developers.*
• Not every film that qualified is in my data set because Metacritic did not have reviews for every film.
• I couldn’t use Rotten Tomatoes scores because those are not an aggregate review score they only show what percentage of critics liked or disliked a film disregarding HOW MUCH they might have liked it.
• Budget numbers are estimates, and they generally don’t include marketing, but for our purposes we’ll say if a movie made more than its production costs it was “profitable”.

*I did include Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, because Square Enix set up a movie production unit to make that film and it received a general release independent of any tie-in product.

The Data

Here’s what my data looks like.  You’ll probably want to click to enlarge unless you have a fondness for reading your monitor with a magnifying glass.

What the Hell That All Means

Twenty-one films is not a great deal of observations for my kind of analysis, but I’m lazy, so that actually works out pretty good for me.  The first thing that jumped out at me is that almost half of these movies lost money.  I’m not sure that’s all that unusual for hollywood, but it certainly isn’t great in my opinion.  But if you add it all up they collectively made over $671 million in profits.  That answers the burning question I’ve had forever: why the hell do they keep making these awful video game adaptations?  They might be awful, but that’s never been a good indication of what will or will not make money.

In fact, I was playing around with the data anlaysis pack in Excel and did a quick regression analysis.  For the normal people out there a regression is basically a way of saying “how much of variable Y is explained by variable X”.  So I took a combination of budget and review score and compared it to net profit or loss and found that those two variables only explained 60-ish percent of variation.  In other words a decent budget and a good review will only get you so far.  At the end of the day these review scores don’t mean dick to the producers….they can’t hear us complaining about the sucky adaptations because there is too much money stuck in their ears.

Which brings me to the fun part of the discussion:

The Winners

Clearly the two big winners in this data set are Mortal Kombat and the Resident Evil series, with strong showings from Hitman, Silent Hill and Angelina Jolie’s boobs (err, I mean Tomb Raider).  Mortal Kombat has the highest metacritic score of every video game movie I looked up and it’s probably only the third or fourth video game adaptation ever made for a general audience.  I’ve got a whole future post planned for what makes video game adaptations work, and Mortal Kombat figures prominently in the “do what these guys did” category.

Mortal Kombat turned in a %511 return on investment (ROI) which is basically just profit or loss divided by the film’s budget.  For every dollar invested in that movie, five came back in profits.  That’s pretty awesome.   Also take a look at that film’s director Paul Anderson.  His name shows up again for Resident Evil, one of the other  big winners in the profitability department.  He directed the first one and was a writer on all three.  Clearly this is the guy to hire when you need to make a video game movie.

The Losers

Pretty much everyone else on the list, including the incredibly aptly titled “Mortal Kombat Colon Annihilation”.   (I freely admit to lifting that joke from The Soup).  It’ s no secret that most of these movies are terrible.  The average review score of the entire bunch is around 30 out of 100.  That goes down to around 24 if you only include the ones that lost money.

If we’re playing more than just a numbers game and being honest with ourselves just about every game adaptation really belongs in this category.  Only two films in the whole list got to 50 or higher.  Compare this to comic book or novel adaptations which have been nominated for and won academy awards.   Video game movies are still a comparatively new genre but they have a long way still to go.

Uwe Boll

Many does that guy suck or what?  I know he’s a frequently used punching bag, but  I couldn’t wrap this article without taking a shot or two.  His average review score is 15.8 and he’s lost his investors over 90 million dollars.  Plus advertising!  It makes me want to do a follow up article and compare other shitty directors to see if anyone else has a worse ROI and still gets to keep making movies.  I expect to see this pop up on the screen sometime during his upcoming Rampage adaptation:

The Bottom Line

For every Mortal Kombat we get five Dooms.  It’s sad really, but video games are tricky to adapt.  They’re interactive works and many of them have more video content than a feature film, so they don’t compress very well.  The end result is usually massive alterations to make the film work for theaters and a disappointed core audience who wanted to see something that represented the game better.

But $671 million dollars have been made so far (ok probably less when you factor in profit-taking, advertising, etc…) and it’s unlikely that Hollywood is going to abandon the practice.  I haven’t seen Prince of Persia yet, but it’s doing well for itself and may be a step in the right direction.  Time will tell, and I’m hopeful that screenwriters will figure out how to adapt these stories.  There are a lot of incredible ones left to re-tell.