Leveling Up or Losing Steam? The Evolution Of Video Game Adaptations In Film And TV
After nearly 30 years of financial failures and infamous embarrassments, Hollywood has finally begun to deliver crowd-pleasing and money-making video game adaptations. Recent successes across film and television include titles as diverse as HBO’s The Last of Us, Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, Netflix’s The Witcher, Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Peacock’s Twisted Metal and more.
Similar to how the Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man films around the turn of the century helped to push comic book material from the periphery of entertainment to the center, these titles have successfully changed the narrative around video game adaptations. As such, Hollywood is hoping video games can be the next funnel of blockbuster intellectual property.
But is that realistic?
On the small screen, Japan and the US are the two largest suppliers of video game adaptations, with the former responsible for a 57.7% supply share in 2023 and the latter delivering a 28.9% share. Though the US is only producing nearly half as many TV series in this genre, these titles account for a 63.4% demand share domestically compared to Japan’s 28.7%. As supply outstrips demand for Japan’s video game TV series exports, it suggests a level of over-investment, while demand outweighs supply in the US, implying further investment is warranted.
But digging deeper into the output for both countries, it’s clear that the top titles are driving the vast majority of demand, which is often the case across most genres. The hits pay for the misses, yet it remains to be seen how many surefire new hits are left to be made.
Video game adaptations tend to draw a younger and more male-skewing demographic. As such, there is a clear audience expansion opportunity. Yet as the superhero genre does battle with feisty fatigue, the potential power ups video games offer may not be the salvation the entertainment industry is hoping for.
For starters, it’s much easier said than done to shift from an active medium (video games) to a passive one (TV/film) in a creatively compelling way. This is partly evidenced by the graveyard of failed adaptations spanning the last three decades, as well as the lack of output from the Netflix and Ubisoft partnership that was originally announced back in 2020.
More notably, when looking at the best selling video games of all time, it’s not as if there is a mountain of untapped potential. The majority of the most popular games — Pokemon, Tetris, Super Mario, Resident Evil, HALO, The Witcher, etc. — have already been adapted. Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, The Legend of Zelda and Call of Duty are among the most notable titles yet to receive any sort of mainstream live-action adaptations, and some of these are already in development.
There are newer or smaller games that do not rank among the highest sellers of all time that can be successfully adapted, of course. Destiny and Skyrim make a certain amount of sense. Marvel famously used B and C-list characters to launch the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Quality is ultimately the most significant factor for any story and it is completely unfettered from fan awareness (for my money, Ubisoft and IFC Films’ 2021 feature Werewolves Within totally rules). But Marvel is the exception to the rule and, generally speaking, a larger built-in fanbase and broader brand recognition is easier to translate to a new medium from a commercial standpoint.
As long running franchises such as Transformers, Jurassic World, John Wick and Fast and Furious wind down and/or run out of steam and as Marvel and DC face creative and commercial challenges, Hollywood is desperate to find the next source of blockbuster IP. Unfortunately for the industry, video game IP, as valuable as it may be right now, might be a bit more finite of a resource than initially hoped.
