The biggest question following The Super Mario Bros. Galaxy Movie‘s box-office blowout isn’t whether or not it works as a movie, but how its financial haul will affect the future of video game movies. The movie’s record-breaking success—the biggest Wednesday opening in April of all time!—suggests that the audience for AAA video game adaptations like The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($1.36 billion at the global box office) and A Minecraft Movie ($961 million) don’t mind that those movies often feel like narrative-light Easter egg hunts. But the bigger these movies get, the closer they get to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, IP-forward products made by board rooms rather than filmmakers.
Nintendo president Shigeru Miyamoto has said that he’s very interested in using cross-media projects like The Super Mario Bros. Movie to appeal to people who don’t play video games, which may explain why both Mario movies are so impersonal and soulless that they’re only really valuable as brand maintenance. On the flip side, YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Mark Fischbach’s surprising financial success with his claustrophobic indie sci-fi chiller Iron Lung suggests that when it comes to video game adaptations, smaller might be better, both in terms of quality and maybe even profitability.
Fischbach’s detailed and faithful adaptation works as well as it does because he didn’t try to force it to be all things to all people. It went on to gross $50 million on a reported budget of three to four million dollars. Granted, Fischbach’s established online fanbase helped to put his adaptation of David Szymanski’s 2022 Lovecraftian submersible simulator over the top, especially since it didn’t have a traditional advertising budget. But as far as the creative process went, Fischbach was likely helped considerably by the fact that Szymanski was the original game’s solo developer, making him a lot easier to work with than a AAA gaming juggernaut. Szymanski has said that he was happy to give Fischbach direct feedback on his adaptation, personally advising him on the screenplay and giving him support during the movie’s pre-production phase.
So if that’s possible, why do the most prominent AAA game adaptations seem made by a MCU-style committee?
“The fundamental rule that Hollywood operates by is: As budgets approach infinity, the audience’s intelligence required to understand it approaches zero,” screenwriter C. Robert Cargill tells The A.V. Club. Cargill has worked on both video game adaptations—like unproduced films of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Resident Evil that he co-developed with Black Phone 2 director Scott Derrickson—and comic book movies like Doctor Strange. Cargill argues that there’s now more creative freedom in adapting video games than there is in adapting comic book movies. For writers like Cargill, collaborating with Marvel is like accepting a pair of golden handcuffs. “You absolutely wanna work for them because everyone’s gonna see those movies,” he says. “But at the same time, there’s a lot of limitations to working in a cinematic universe like that. You can’t make a story choice on a whim because that may contradict something that has already been shot for a Disney+ show. You don’t have that problem in a video game movie.”
At the same time, video game writers and developers aren’t recognized by film industry unions like the Writers Guild Of America, making it easier for big companies, those that spend over $300 million to develop a AAA game, to treat movie adaptations like brand extensions instead of self-sufficient works of pop art. Take last year’s Until Dawn adaptation, a generic Cabin-In-The-Woods-meets-Groundhog-Day horror pastiche that had little to do with Supermassive’s popular and BAFTA-winning horror game. The original game’s writers, indie horror filmmakers Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick, weren’t mentioned in the movie’s end credits, where Until Dawn is said only to be “based on the Playstation Studios video game.” The brand is the most important thing, just like how Marvel and DC Comics adaptations focus more on introducing and showcasing their characters rather than the stories (not to mention writers and artists) that helped to establish those characters in the first place.
When I previously reported on Fessenden and Reznick’s lack of credit for the Until Dawn movie, I was told that a “written by” credit was only guaranteed as part of a union contract with movie studios, according to WGA West Board Of Directors member Rob Foreman. Emailing with me last year, Foreman said that “in video games, that kind of guarantee and protection doesn’t currently exist, so credit can be more arbitrarily determined by individual game companies.”
Some indie movie producers are trying to level that drastically uneven playing field. Game writer and podcaster Alanah Pearce recently announced that her new production studio, Charred Pictures, would work closely with indie video game developers on forthcoming movie adaptations like the survival horror trilogy Faith: The Unholy Trinity and the first-person psychological horror game Dead Take. “I don’t think it makes any sense at all for an adapted screenplay not to include direct input from the writers of the original source material,” Pearce tells The A.V. Club. “It’s their world—they created the story, the characters, and the plot that has resonated with the audience so much. They know it better than anyone else.”
Some recent horror video game adaptations, like the supernatural psychodrama The Mortuary Assistant, suggest that Pearce might be on to something. The Mortuary Assistant was directed by Jeremiah Kipp and co-adapted by the game’s original solo developer Brian Clarke. Kipp had previously collaborated on several Fessenden-produced indie horror titles, so he knew about Fessenden and Reznick’s lack of recognition for Until Dawn—something that gave him extra motivation to seek out Clarke’s advice. Better yet, Clarke ensured that Kipp and his co-writer Tracee Beebe maintained creative control over their adaptation, since their movie was produced by Epic Pictures Group, which owns the publishing company that made the game in the first place, DreadXP. “Epic really wanted Brian to be happy, and he protected me,” Kipp tells The A.V. Club. “When I was brought on, Brian called me up right away to say, ‘The best way to honor this game is for you to make a good movie.'”
Clarke recalls that while Epic Pictures provided some notes throughout the screenwriting process, they mostly suggested ways to better achieve certain storytelling effects. “They never really had heavy opinions when it came to the story itself,” Clarke says. DreadXP also didn’t provide much feedback on the adaptation since, according to Clarke, “that’s not their wheelhouse.” Rather than the by-committee approach of these larger adaptations, it was a direct collaboration.
Conversely, producer-turned-writer-director Genki Kawamura showed his appreciation of the horror-themed walking simulator The Exit 8 by not approaching his movie, Exit 8, like a normal adaptation. That’s partly out of necessity, since Kotake Create’s game doesn’t have a traditional story. Like the game, Kawamura’s movie follows a commuter’s nightmarish journey through a non-descript Japanese subway tunnel that has no traditional exit. Instead, the end of one corridor loops back to its start, like a Möbius Strip or an improbable M.C. Escher design. The only way for the nameless commuter (Kazunari Ninomiya) to escape is by making eight complete circuits of the tunnel, turning back every time he spots an “anomaly” in the tunnel. In Kawamura’s movie, the commuter’s frustrated escape attempts reflect his own tortured mindset after his girlfriend unexpectedly tells him that she’s pregnant and he’s the father.
“For this movie, we were like architects,” Kawamura tells The A.V. Club. “It was as if Kotake Create gave me the blueprints for a new structure and I, along with my production designers and other collaborators, built something new.”
Ironically, Kawamura took to heart some advice that he received from Nintendo’s Miyamoto, who argued that the key to making a great video game is to make something that’s not only fun for the player to engage with, but also for anyone watching the player. “Sometimes I put the movie’s audience in the player’s shoes,” Kawamura says. “Other times I present the game’s action as if the audience is watching another player’s livestream.”
Kawamura adds that he wouldn’t have enjoyed so much creative freedom if Kotake Create was as big as, say, Nintendo. “The source material is an indie game, so we weren’t interfacing with a giant organization. In reality, it was one person,” referring to Kotake, the company’s solo developer. “So we were able to communicate with him and tap into the purest form of his vision for his game. This direct interaction between creators is what led to this movie’s success.”
While involving video game writers and developers in the adaptation process obviously doesn’t guarantee a better movie, having their support and input usually helps. Just don’t expect the makers of AAA games to learn that lesson any time soon, according to Pearce.
“When the system is so focused on profit, AAA publishers are always going to want to ensure their writers are writing full-time on video games, and outsource the film production side of things,” Pearce says. Pearce also doesn’t expect the WGA and other movie unions’ recognition of video game writers to change in the near future either. “I do recognize that including video game writers is difficult for the WGA, being that our contracts work so differently,” Pearce says, referring specifically to how most video game writers are full-time, salaried employees while most screenwriters are contract employees. “I have sympathy for how complicated it might be to find terms that recognize these vastly different approaches. But just because something is hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.” It might be hard to believe that movie studios would ditch the MCU-style approach that helped create the modern superhero boom in favor of something more creative-friendly, but idealistic and dedicated producers like Pearce—and an incoming wave of smaller adaptations—make it easier to imagine a future where better video game adaptations are made with the help and recognition of their original creators.
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