When I was around six or seven, the first trailers for the Super Mario Bros. movie came. I was very into Mario despite not actually having played the games. Some time, maybe that year or a year or two later, I was at the defunct camp that my dad's friend and colleague had gotten as a vacation home in Maine where I was able to play his son's Super Nintendo and get my first experience of Super Mario World, which to this day is, to me, the "quintessential" video game.
But I was a little kid born in the 1980s, and as video games as an industry were exploding in popularity and pop culture influence, I was very excited about the film. I never actually saw it (I caught some of it on TV decades later) but the Super Mario Bros. movie is infamous.
Bob Hoskins and Joe Leguizamo (two actors of a caliber far above this project) apparently bonded over how miserable the production was. The producers, it's said, were really interested in making a movie set in a dark and gritty, brutalist metropolis, and so they transformed the bright and colorful Mushroom Kingdom into some kind of weird subterranean dystopia. Bowser, or Koopa (which, to be fair, is what he's called in Japan) was turned into a Donald Trump-type (see, we knew how awful he was back then. The dark alternate present in Back to the Future Part II also makes Biff into his equivalent. Too bad he didn't just remain a footnote in the history of how tacky 80s excess was).
As the first major adaptation of a video game in Western media, the movie really set the tone. The makers of the movie clearly felt no real respect or affection for the franchise, and basically slapped the brand onto their own weird, bad movie idea.
And adaptations of video games that happened since followed a similar pattern. No one was really putting much effort into making these good. Over time, the very concept of adapting a video game story to the screen came to seem like an inherently bad idea.
But things have been changing lately.
It's not a question of budget or the investment of star power - Uncharted was a failure despite the presence of Tom Holland (and Mark Wahlberg, though I'm not sure Wahlberg is a "put asses in the seats" kind of presence) but decades earlier we had Angelina Joli in two Tomb Raider movies.
However, where I've noticed things changing has been in animated series. Netflix's Castlevania series, while excessively gory and violent, still manages to tell a decent story and takes itself seriously enough to get through that story. The bigger example, though, and the one that I think really marks a big change, is Arcane. This series adapts the backstories of a number of League of Legends characters - one of those games where, whatever lore exists in the world, you don't see a ton in the game itself. Arcane has gone beyond the successes of the Castlevania anime and is now winning awards.
The reason for this change I think is pretty clear: In the old days, video games were a pretty exclusively youth-oriented medium. As gamers have grown older - not to mention the fact that some older people have also learned to embrace the medium - the respect and love for the storytelling in games has grown.
Now, you have people who understand the appeal these games have, and have grown up with their stories. Producers can also now expect audiences to take the stories seriously. Part of that, of course, is the maddening obsession with brand recognition that has choked Hollywood of late, but I think it's also a newfound respect for games as an art form. (It's also newfound respect for the fact that the games industry is bigger than Hollywood at this point.)
Having come of age at a time when you sort of hoped that they wouldn't try to make a film adaptation of your favorite games, I think it's kind of exciting to see that they're actually pulling it off now. At least sometimes.
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