Leveraging TV and movie adaptations to benefit game franchises | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

So, there’s a prestige, high-budget TV show based on Fallout, and it’s not only pretty great, it’s also so successful that a second season has already been greenlit. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this is how unsurprising it has become – how little time it took for us all to become blasé about video games properties being adapted into high-quality, well-received TV shows and movies. Go back in time only ten years or so and try to explain that this would happen to anyone in the industry, and they’d think you a hopeless optimist at best.

Yet here we are in 2024 with not only Fallout, but a host of other successful adaptations of game properties fuelling a major boom in companies vying to bring the next big game IP to other screens.

Indeed, as we get caught up in the hype around each major new game-based TV show, it's easy to miss just how consistent this trend has become in a very short space of time. The Last of Us and now Fallout are the standouts, certainly, but there's also an ongoing Halo show, The Witcher is arguably an adaptation of the games as much as the original novel, and there are successful animated shows tying into League of Legends, Cyberpunk, and Castlevania.

On the movie side, Super Mario Bros was one of the biggest box office successes of 2023 and the Sonic movies have developed into a solid franchise, while titles like Uncharted and Five Nights at Freddy’s have been commercial successes even if they didn’t exactly land with critics.

Admittedly, there are also some less successful efforts. Capcom's franchises in particular often seem to be done dirty by the partnerships they strike to develop TV and movies, with the Monster Hunter movie being a dud and Resident Evil, despite being one of the first game franchises to achieve cinema success all the way back in 2002, recently being poorly served by low-quality shows and movies. Sony’s Twisted Metal also didn't exactly light the world on fire last year.

Now that Hollywood is tapping games IP for