If you’re even tangentially aware of video games, TV shows, or movies, you’re probably well aware that there have been a lot of attempts to bring video games to different mediums, usually ending up with an inferior version of the original. Mercifully, the last few years have actually seen quite a few fantastic adaptations of video games gracing the silver (or small) screen.
It seems Hollywood has finally realised that video games are a bigger market than movies for a reason, and has started to try to capture some of that mindshare. When it goes well, it’s great! When it goes poorly, you end up with something like Borderlands. Here today, we’d like to celebrate our favourite video game adaptations, shame the shitty cash grabs, and unpack the failed attempts. So, let’s a go!
Best Video Game Adaptations
With the sheer quantity of video game adaptations on the rise, the time has finally come for some positive results. Releases such as Fallout and The Last of Us have helped to improve the overall quality of the genre but with the premiere of Borderlands making headlines for all the wrong reasons, we’re hesitant to say Hollywood has worked out all the kinks. With all that said, let’s dive into some of our favourite video game adaptations.
1. Super Mario Bros. Movie
- Release Date: 1 April, 2023
- Runtime: 92 minutes
- IMDB Rating: 7.0
- Cast: Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogan
- Budget: US$100 million
- Box Office Earnings: US$1.36 billion
There’s a reason we used this movie as a bit of a case-study above: it’s far better than it has any right to be. Just like 90 per cent of the video games, The Super Mario Bros. Movie sees brothers Mario and Luigi traversing the Mushroom Kingdom to defeat King Koopa himself, Bowser, while also saving Princess Peach.
The Mario movie doesn’t just take inspiration from the Mario series, it revels in the references and includes every major character from the series you could have expected to see. It tells the quintessential Mario story, all the while bringing something new to the franchise. It was good enough to see a sequel green lit, which will be launching in 2026.
If this is what Nintendo’s movies are going to look like moving forward, we’re very keen to see what they do with The Legend of Zelda.
2. Castlevania
- Release Date: 7 July, 2017
- Seasons: 4+1
- IMDB Rating: 8.3
- Cast: Richard Armitage, James Callis, Graham McTavish, Alejandra Reynoso
Another classic, NES-era game done justice, Netflix’s Castlevania series is a different take on the video game adaptation. Where the Mario movie kept things light and family friendly, Castlevania took the opportunity to up the gore, swearing, and action.
The Castlevania series tells the story of the vampire-hunting Belmont family’s eternal war against Dracula, and the Netflix series hews pretty close to that, taking heavy inspiration from Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, and Castlevania: Curse of Darkness. There’s a second series, Castlevania: Nocturne, that likewise follows the story of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood.
The Castlevania series are gothic horror-inspired games that put action at the fore, which is a fantastic fit for a brutal, action-packed anime, and, packed with some jokes you probably don’t want your kids hearing, the show ends up greater than the sum of its parts. Seriously, there’s a reason we called it one of the Best Cartoons for Adults.
3. Fallout
- Release Date: 10 April, 2024
- Seasons: 1
- IMDB Rating: 8.4
- Cast: Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan, Walton Goggins
Compared to some of the other ‘good’ adaptations on this list, Fallout is a bit of an outlier. Rather than faithfully retell a story from the series, Fallout instead bases itself in the world created by the video games and tells its own story. Thankfully, it does so with the care and levity necessary to make it all work, and stays close enough to the series’ conventions to bring the wasteland to life.
Amazon’s effort brings everything a Fallout adaptation needs: atomic bombs, ghouls, a post-apocalyptic America, vaults, and Dogmeat. It’s a show that isn’t afraid to lean on just how silly the source material is, but also finds a way to weave a through-line of family drama into its story: something the games also frequently do.
The first season was incredibly exciting, and we’re waiting patiently for more news on what comes next.
4. NieR:Automata Ver1.1a
- Release Date: 8 January, 2023
- Seasons: 2
- IMDB Rating: 7.2
- Cast: Kira Buckland, Kyle McCarley, D.C. Douglas, Abby Trott, Cherami Leigh, Greg Chun, Ray Chase
If you’ve never heard of the NieR series, I wouldn’t blame you. They’re some of the best games of recent memory, but are pretty niche outings. On the surface, NieR looks like typical Japanese anime schlock, but the series is well known for its gameplay and deeply troubling psychological themes: it’s the kind of story where things seem simple until the rug is pulled out from under the characters and everything starts turning to shit.
Unsurprisingly, the Ver1.1a anime is the same. Looking at it on the surface, it appears as though it’s a faithful retelling of the story of 2015’s NieR:Automata, but the truth is a bit deeper than that. I really don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, but I’d definitely advise anyone keen on watching this one to play the game first (and get all five endings, please).
With no new NieR game in sight, the Ver1.1a anime is the closest thing we have to a continuation of the series at the moment. Thankfully, it fills the void admirably.
5. The Witcher
- Release Date: 20 December, 2019
- Seasons: 3
- IMDB Rating: 8.0
- Cast: Henry Cavill, Anya Chalotra, Freya Allan, Joey Batey
The Witcher is a series that gives its story, and the characters within it, the room to breath and grow over the course of its runtime. Based on the source material books, The Witcher‘s plot actually take place years prior to the events of CD Projekt RED’s insanely popular video game series, so can be watched without fear of doubling up on what you already know.
When the show was first announced, we weren’t too sure about Henry Cavill as the fabled Geralt of Rivia, but he ended up being the perfect casting. Due to creative differences, though, Cavill won’t be returning to the show for the final two seasons. Instead, Liam Hemsworth will give the Witcher life it a good ol’ try, and we’re keen to see how his version of Geralt works.
If you’re a fan of the games, or the books, you’ve probably already watched the series. But, if for whatever reason you skipped it, it’s an easy recommend.
6. Pokémon
- Release Date: 1 April, 1997
- Seasons: 25
- IMDB Rating: 7.5
- Cast: Veronica Taylor, Rachael Lillis, Eric Stuart
Though it came out only a year after the original Pokémon Red and Green graced the Game Boy, the Pokémon anime is both an incredibly faithful retelling of the original games’ events, as well as distinctly its own thing. Somehow, it straddles that line well.
Following Ash Ketchum’s journey to be the best Pokémon trainer there ever was, Pokémon tells a mixture of simple and complex tales, and played a vital role in turning Pokémon into the biggest entertainment franchise in the history of the world (it’s made twice as much money as Star Wars, to put that into perspective).
Clocking in at over 1,000 episodes, though, it’s a tough one to crack these days unless you have hundreds of hours of free-time. Then again, if you’re a fan of Pokémon you probably drop hundreds of hours on the games already.
7. The Last of Us
- Release date: 15 January, 2023
- Seasons: 1
- IMDB Rating: 8.7
- Cast: Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Nick Offerman, Nico Parker, Anna Torv
One of the few horror video game franchises that has been adapted faithfully, HBO’s The Last of Us is a truly impressive achievement. It helps that the game itself is already incredibly cinematic and story-focused, which made the transition to a TV show fairly simple. Hell, Neil Druckmann, the guy who created the series, was heavily involved in the making of the show so it had all the support it needed to be good.
And good it is. The Last of Us treads the line between being terrific and terrifying, with incredible performances from Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey elevating what was already a pretty tight script. Travelling a world long collapsed, Joel and Ellie must make their way across what remains of the United States in order to, hopefully, make a difference to those left alive in the aftermath of a zombie-like plague.
A second season in is the works already, which focuses on the events of The Last of Us: Part II, so catch up quick!
Terrible Video Game Adaptations
Okay, we’ve got all the good ones out of the way: time to get to the fun stuff. Video game movies have been bad for as long as we can remember, and the ones that are good are absolutely in the minority, so we’ve had to cut a lot of potential inclusions here. Without going on forever, we’ve whittled the list down to an approachable seven movies you can watch or avoid at your discretion.
1. Borderlands
- Release Date: 8 August, 2024
- Runtime: 102 minutes
- IMDB Rating: 4.3
- Cast: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt, Jamie Lee Curtis, Florian Munteanu
- Budget: US$120 million
- Box Office Earnings: US$17 million
The talk of the town at the moment: Borderlands is, by all accounts, a complete dumpster fire. Shot over three years ago and having had much of the action and violence edited out, what viewers are left with is a confusing mess. Filled to the brim with characters with little to no motivation going through the motions of what the plot needs them to do, Borderlands finds a way to make a 102 minute movie feel long.
It’s an odd choice of series to convert to a movie in the first place. The writing, dialogue and story have always been the weakest parts of the Borderlands games, which are far more focused on getting you shooting everything that moves with guns that do whacky shit. Little of that made the cut, which means the movie needs to lean on the thin world-building and characters to be worth watching. No prizes for guessing how that went.
While it may have one of the most stacked casts on this list, it does feel like almost every actor in Borderlands was miscast and reimagined to fit the character archetypes popularised by Marvel in the past decade. How many Guardians of the Galaxy rip offs do we really need?
2. Resident Evil
- Release Date: 15 March, 2002
- Runtime: 100 minutes
- IMDB Rating: 6.6
- Cast: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy
- Budget: US$33 million
- Box Office Earnings: US$103 million
Where to even start with this one. The Resident Evil movies are infamous for having almost entirely ignored what made the games work and instead just doing whatever they want at the time. You get the feeling that director Paul W.S. Anderson watched The Matrix a few years earlier and said, “I want to make that, but with zombies”.
You still have the basics: A global pharmaceutical giant, Umbrella, is a front for bio-weapons research and things get out of hand when the T-Virus is accidentally unleashed on Racoon City. But, rather than a slow-burn horror movie featuring people trapped in a zombie-infested mansion (or city, in the case of the sequels) and fighting for their very lives, the first Resident Evil movie leaned heavily into gun-fu, with main character Alice being a one-woman killing machine unleashed on a horde of slow moving targets.
As the series grew the movies became their own thing, eventually ending up as some kind of post-apocalyptic Mad Max-with-zombies thing. They’re fun to watch, and it’s a guilty pleasure, for sure, but it’s hard to call it good.
3. Uncharted
- Release Date: 7 February, 2022
- Runtime: 116 minutes
- IMDB Rating: 6.3
- Cast: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Sophia Ali, Tati Gabrielle, Antonio Banderas
- Budget: US$120 million
- Box Office Earnings: US$407 million
With how well Sony and developer Naughty Dog adapted The Last of Us, it’s surprising just boring the Uncharted movie is. It feels like a budget Indiana Jones, mixed with some Pirates of the Caribbean for good measure, but fails to hit the highs of either of those franchises.
Instead, the movie just exists. Tom Holland is a great actor and all, as are Mark Wahlberg and Antonio Banderas, but there’s only so much you can do with a script as boring as this one. The movie did well, financially, though, and a sequel is apparently in development now, which will likely tell a story closer to the original Uncharted game.
Will it be a better movie? We certainly hope so.
4. Street Fighter
- Release Date: 23 December, 1994
- Runtime: 102 minutes
- IMDB Rating: 4.1
- Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, Ming-Na Wen, Kylie Minogue
- Budget: US$35 million
- Box Office Earnings: US$99.4 million
An absolute classic in the bad-video-game-adaptation club, 1994’s Street Fighter is infamous for a few reasons. One, it’s the final role of Raul Julia, who clearly loves playing a megalomaniacal villain in M. Bison, and two, because it’s awful. In a similar vein to Resident Evil, Street Fighter takes the basic concept of the game and twists it into something completely different.
At the very least, the fighting is pretty good, but every famous character you can name from the games appear to have been rewritten in order to fit a more militaristic theme. Ryu and Ken, the faces of Street Fighter, are turned into con men for some reason, while Dhalsim is a doctor, Blanka is Charlie, and Chun Li is a reporter.
It’s one saving grace is that it is clearly a B-movie by design, and you can laugh along with it as much as you laugh at it. There’s a new live-action Street Fighter movie coming in 2026, apparently, so let’s hope they do a better job this time.
5. Silent Hill
- Release Date: 21 April, 2006
- Runtime: 126 minutes
- IMDB Rating: 6.5
- Cast: Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Deborah Kara Unger
- Budget: US$50 million
- Box Office Earnings: US$100.6 million
The other big video game horror franchise, Silent Hill probably has a better movie version than Resident Evil. It’s actually kind of unsettling in parts, and leans on psychological and body horror to induce some dread in its audience, just as the games do. Unfortunately, it’s also a strangely boring movie that takes some odd liberties with the source material, without actually adding anything new.
The movie loosely follows the plot of the original Silent Hill, with a parent wandering the abandoned and famously-foggy town in search of their daughter. Every now and again the world shifts to a rusty hellscape, and mutilated people-things attempt to kill anyone they see. Some characters are different, some names are changed, and the motivations of some key characters are quite different than they are in the game, but ultimately it does the job.
The same can’t be said for the movies’ sequels, which completely fall apart under the weight of wanting to be a breakout hit. The series went dark for a long time, but there’s a new Silent Hill movie coming in soon from the same director, Christophe Gans.
6. Mortal Kombat
- Release Date: 18 August, 1995
- Runtime: 101 minutes
- IMDB Rating: 5.8
- Cast: Christopher Lambert, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Linden Ashby, Robin Shou, Brigette Wilson-Sampras
- Budget: US$20 million
- Box Office Earnings: US$122.2 million
Made at a time that Mortal Kombat was infamous for its seeming brutality and violence, the 1995 movie version of the famous fighting-game series was, bafflingly, made explicitly to be a PG-13 movie. That meant cutting most of the things that make Mortal Kombat stand out: gruesome fatalities and violent combat.
Unlike its contemporary, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat at least features the basic plot of the source – an inter-dimensional fighting tournament with the threat of world domination on the line – but a truly awful script, coupled with some poor performances, drag the whole thing down. Critics at the time called it junk food, and it hasn’t gotten a lot better with age.
Like most of the movies on this list it’s certainly landed cult classic status, and if anything, the music was absolultely awesome.
7. Monster Hunter
- Release Date: 3 December, 2020
- Runtime: 103 minutes
- IMDB Rating: 5.2
- Cast: Milla Jovovich, Tony Jaa, Ron Pearlman, Clifford Harris, Meagan Good
- Budget: US$60 million
- Box Office Earnings: US$47.8 million
With the success of 2018’s Monster Hunter: World, what was once a niche franchise was thrown into the lime light, and you know what that means: a movie version wasn’t far away. Launching in 2020, Monster Hunter took a decidedly Resident Evil approach to adapting the source material and essentially created its own different universe (it’s also directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, and stars Milla Jovovich, so there’s quite a bit of cross over).
Unfortunately, the new storyline misses the whole point of what Monster Hunter is, trading interesting questions about population management and balancing natural ecosystems for a Michael Bay-esque ‘explode first, ask questions later’ approach. The monster and weapon designs are actually very faithful to the games, though, and seeing a Diablos topple an army truck is a pretty good time.
What Makes a Video Game Adaptation Work?
To start with, it’s worth looking into why some succeed where others fail. The more we came up with the list, the more we started to notice a consistent trend among the winners: the best adaptations tend to have a pretty good understanding of what makes the series in question tick.
It seems obvious, but it really isn’t. It’s easy to look at the original Super Mario Bros. movie, released in 1993, and compare it to The Super Mario Bros. Movie of 2023: one, a live-action, weirdly cyberpunk story about dimensional travel, and the other a colourful, family-friendly animated film that eschews far closer to the source material.
Additionally, most of the best video game adaptations were TV shows and were given the time and space to tell something of a compelling story. It could be that the episodic format lends itself better to video game stories, which tend to be driven by cinematic moments of storytelling interspersed between actual gameplay – be that exploring, sneaking, or whatever else. It could also be that there’s more money in TV shows these days and that they’re less risky to make than a big-budget blockbuster and, therefore, can be allowed to breathe. We don’t know, but we definitely had to cull the list of bad video game movies to a minimum.
Why Trust Our List?
This list of video game adaptations was selected by our dedicated team of entertainment editors and journalists. Author Dean Blake curated the list based on personal experience while also taking into account IMDb reviews, Rotten Tomatoes rankings and critic reviews. The Man of Many entertainment and technology expert has personally chosen every adaptation on this list, providing extensive first-hand details and insights related to each title. For more information on how we select these lists, view our editorial guidelines.
