Super Mario Bros. is on Amazon Prime and video game movies have never been better
As Uncharted releases in cinemas to expectedly poor reviews, the original Super Mario movie shows how little things have changed.
When Super Mario Bros. was released to cinemas in May 1993 it became the first ever live action video game movie. It got terrible reviews, performed poorly at the box office, and had virtually nothing to do with the games it was nominally based on. As such it set the template for video game movies for the next three decades, and it’s genuinely shocking how little anyone seems to have learned from its mistakes.
The strangest thing about video game movies is that Hollywood keeps making them, despite most struggling to even break even. Pokémon: Detective Pikachu still managed to underperform, despite generally being regarded as the best quality adaptation so far, while Sonic The Hedgehog is the highest grossing and yet still only saw an estimated profit of around $100 million – chump changed compared to a true blockbuster.
And yet still Hollywood persists, with Uncharted currently struggling to get into the black despite the benefit of Tom Holland as its star and pandemic restrictions relaxing all around the world. The worse thing is that Uncharted is one of the better video game movies, in that it’s mediocre rather than actively bad and they at least bothered to keep all the characters’ names the same.
That’s not sarcasm, as one of the original scripts, written as the movie made its progress through six separate directors, portrayed Nathan Drake as part of a family of globetrotting explorers who protect ancient antiquities from less scrupulous collectors. A concept which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the games, other than ancient treasures are involved.
There are generally two different kinds of
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