The Super Mario Bros. Movie, after their successful weekend opening, is now the fifth highest grossing animated film and 24th highest grossing film. While these facts are impressive on their own, what makes them more impressive is that The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a movie adaptation of a video game.
Adaptations of video games have been the bane for visual media producers. The highest grossing video game film before Mario, now at 1.162 billion USD, was Warcraft, which grossed 439 million USD worldwide. However, most of the success of Warcraft was thanks to its popularity in China; it did not do as well as expected in other parts of the world, gathering negative reviews. On a general basis, most films based on games flop regardless of the popularity of the franchise or the cast. And even if a film adaptation of a video game performs well in the box office, like Warcraft, most of them do not receive great reviews.
In a sense, video games as a form of media have more layers of interaction. Books provide the simplest interaction as they are just made of writing. Visual media adds visuals and sounds. Video games add user input on top of what movies can provide. The presence of these different layers of interaction, and the lack thereof, gives people different experiences and entertainment. Books use imagery and imagination to account for the lack of colorful visuals. In the case of video games, by having an extra interaction of control, people can make their experiences truly personal by working their way through the story.
The problem arises when adapting material with different layers to another. When moving up from media with fewer layers to more complex ones, creators have to additionally provide satisfactory visuals or gameplay while maintaining the original quality, which becomes a headache for creators. On the other hand, moving down from more layers requires creators to remove aspects of the source material that gave people the magical experience — a bigger headache. This is why video games are difficult to adapt to movies. Pr
The main issue that diminished the magical experience of adaptations of video games was that writers lazily used the original story for the film. John Carmack — creator of DOOM and Quake, and probably the most influential video game creator of the 90s — once said, “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie.” At the time, video games lacked the technology to successfully narrate a complex story, and writers did not take into account how simple the writing and story were. While there has been a recent increase in storytelling quality in the video game industry with the improvement in technology, video game’s heavy dependence on gameplay for entertainment was not taken into enough consideration in past adaptations.
However, with recent releases of film or TV series adaptations of video games, it seems like writers and producers had a glimpse of the success formula. Writers have recently begun putting in the effort to create different variations of storytelling. TV shows like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Arcane contributed to the already existing lore by adding new characters and reprising familiar ones without contradicting preexisting details. The Last of Us intentionally modified some details from the video game so that it would better fit as a TV series. like the timeline of the story. Likewise, The Super Mario Bros. Movie took existing lore and details in the game franchise and modified them to better fit the format of a movie. These modifications in Mario, along with the child-friendly visuals, transformed the absurd game mechanics of an Italian plumber in suspenders consuming mushrooms, jumping around brick platforms, and fighting a giant fire-breathing turtle into adequate tools for storytelling.
From these successes, one thing is evident: effort and innovation is crucial to create a well-made movie or series adaptation of video games. Creators’ effort to understand the strengths of the original game along with its shortcomings is necessary to know how to modify its storytelling to fit a movie or series format. Innovation furthers this effort, contributing more content to the original story. Without this, the adaptation would become a simple copy of the video game.
With the success of video game-based TV series and now movies, more video game adaptation projects have been greenlighted. However, like the case with comic books in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe, effort and innovation is key for these adaptations. The recent success of video game films and shows will create a boom in similar contents as it did for comic books. Hopefully, creators will learn from the mistakes of comic books and not get drunk from their success, regressing to lazy storytelling.