What happens when you take beloved game franchises and hand them to directors who think pixels are beneath them?
The 1990s gave us the answer. Super Mario Bros. turned the colourful Mushroom Kingdom into a dystopian wasteland where Dennis Hopper chewed scenery as King Koopa. Street Fighter cast Jean-Claude Van Damme as an American colonel named Guile, complete with his thick Belgian accent. Mortal Kombat at least tried to capture the fighting tournament concept, but then Mortal Kombat: Annihilation happened and made everyone forget the first one wasn’t completely terrible.
Hollywood saw dollar signs in gaming’s growing popularity but refused to understand what made these properties work. Studios treated video game adaptations like quick cash grabs, assuming audiences would show up based on name recognition alone. The source material was an afterthought, something to be “improved” by adding unnecessary complexity and dramatic weight to simple, fun concepts.
Super Mario Bros. exemplifies everything wrong with this approach. The game was about a plumber jumping on mushrooms and saving a princess. Simple, colourful, and joyful. The movie turned it into a convoluted sci-fi mess about parallel dimensions and evolutionary theory. They took Mario’s red shirt and blue overalls and dressed him like a leather-jacketed rebel. They transformed Bowser from a cartoon turtle-dragon into a slick businessman in suits. Every creative decision seemed designed to distance the film from its source material.
Street Fighter suffered from similar contempt for the source. The game was about international fighters competing in a tournament, each with distinct fighting styles and personalities. The movie turned it into a generic action flick about stopping a dictator, with Chun-Li as a news reporter and most characters reduced to background fodder. Van Damme’s Guile became the protagonist despite being one of the less interesting characters in the game roster.
These failures established a pattern that poisoned video game adaptations for decades. Hollywood executives learned the wrong lesson from early flops. Instead of respecting source material, they concluded that video games were inherently unfilmable. Instead of hiring directors who understood gaming, they doubled down on treating games as inferior source material that needed complete overhauls to work in cinema.
The damage ran deeper than box office failures. These movies actively harmed gaming’s cultural reputation. Critics and audiences who might have been curious about video games saw these terrible adaptations and concluded that games must be shallow, childish, or incoherent. The films reinforced stereotypes about gaming being mindless entertainment for kids, setting back gaming’s acceptance as a legitimate storytelling medium.
Directors approached these projects with visible disdain. They’d publicly dismiss the source material in interviews, explaining how they were “elevating” simple game concepts into sophisticated cinema. This arrogance guaranteed failure. You can’t successfully adapt something you fundamentally misunderstand or actively disrespect.
The financial model was broken too. Studios expected these movies to succeed based purely on brand recognition while spending minimal effort on scripts, casting, or production values. They wanted gaming’s audience without gaming’s creativity, innovation, or respect for player intelligence.
The irony is that games were already telling better stories than most Hollywood blockbusters by the mid-1990s. Final Fantasy VI had more character development and emotional depth than any video game movie from that era. The medium was evolving rapidly while Hollywood remained stuck in the mindset that games were just electronic toys.
This golden age of terrible adaptations created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Good directors avoided video game projects because they were associated with failure. Studios gave smaller budgets to game adaptations because they expected them to fail. The cycle perpetuated itself for years.
So here’s what I want to know: given how spectacularly Hollywood botched every major gaming franchise in the 1990s, why did studios keep making the same mistakes for another two decades?
