From the little screen to the big screen
Rockstar's Dan Houser got us thinking. It seems like every year we have to endure yet another mediocre or downright horrible Hollywood adaptation of a video game property we hold dear. While the video game industry is thriving with creative talent, it seems Hollywood looks more than ever to other forms of media for inspiration. Creating screenplays based on novels, comic books and video games is the rule of the day in Hollywood.
While novels and comic books have made the transition to the silver screen quite successfully, the same certainly can't be said for video games. Video games are unique in that they're designed for interactivity and might focus a bit less on storytelling. This poses a problem for filmmakers because they're taking something designed to be interactive and altering it to make it a passive experience. Beyond that, sometimes the people making the movie haven't even fully played through the source material. It comes as little surprise that movies based on video games just haven't been very good. In fact, the average Metacritic score for the highest grossing video game movies we looked at stands around 35.
Quality concerns aside, a good number of these video game movies have actually been pretty profitable – some very profitable – and as long as Hollywood continues to get a good return on its investment we're going to continue to see films based on our favorite games.
On the following pages we decided to organize the top video game movies from most profitable to least profitable, and for good measure we threw in a bunch at the end that lost money too. Leading the pack at the box office were the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil flicks, and we can't help but think that the lovely leading ladies in each (Angelina Jolie and Milla Jovovich) had something to do with that.
Note: The profitability estimate on each is based strictly on production budget (cost to make the movie) and worldwide box office. In certain cases, large marketing expenditures likely ate into profits, but we don't have access to that data. Furthermore, some of these movies have a long tail in the DVD market and can even make more money on DVD than at the box office. DVD sales are not included in these profitability estimates either.
Many thanks to Box Office Mojo for the data.