Super Mario Bros. wasn’t the biggest film of this year, that’s what the title goes for Barbie. But from 2010 to 2020, the top ten films in North America in any given year were dominated by comic book heroes. The only video game adaptation to join them was Sonic the hedgehogwhich came out in February 2020, just before Covid-19 closed many theaters and transformed cinema habits.
Mario‘s success will lead to a “tidal wave” of video game adaptations, argues Joost van Druenen, professor of business administration at New York University and author of One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games. Van Dreunen believes that superheroes are ‘going the way of the cowboy’, referring to the shifts in Hollywood’s dominant genres (think of the rise of zombies a few years ago, the whole Home alone-like family films from the 1990s). Even a show like The boyshe argues, with its anti-superheroes it seems like a kind of turning point, similar to the revisionist westerns exemplified by Sam Peckinpah’s The wild gangthat came to dominate the genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Provided audiences are as tired of superheroes as experts think, video game protagonists could profitably fill the void. They come from well-known franchises and have a large, committed fan base – two things that studios value. Cast your eyes at the bottom of the development list: God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Assassin’s Creedcontinuous expansion The witcher, among other things. Nintendo, which has traditionally resisted movie spinoffs, plans one movie a year; Arcanegenerally considered the first title (before The last of us) to break the curse of such adaptations is finally getting a second season. Amazon is coming Fallout series is led by the same team as Westworld.
“Video game content is now attractive to filmmakers unlike ever before,” says van Dreunen. “So that comes in at the same time that the superhero movies are starting to reach their conclusion.” Of course, these are not certain things: Gran TurismoMario’s performance was decidedly average, and it would be fair to wonder if any game character can compete with Mario’s star power. Looking to next year, Fallout will be an early litmus. If it gains traction upon release in April, it will be the surest sign yet that pop culture is entering the age of video game adaptation.
Back to the superheroes: artist fatigue is an underexposed factor. Inspiration is missing. Some are undoubtedly tired of the whole enterprise, but many are simply tired of bad movies: and it is clear that these two factors are intertwined. “I think it’s the quality of the film, more than the superheroes themselves,” says Mark Caplan, who worked on video game licensing for Sony Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox and worked on the three Spider-Man games from Tobey. Maguire era. “Superheroes have always found an audience, whether through print or film, television – and that will continue to be the case.”
Film critic Richard Brody has captured this general listlessness its lukewarm review by The miracles. Brody blames copyright restrictions: If artists outside of multinational corporations could reimagine superheroes, talk of “fatigue” would be outdated; that world is unfortunately still many years away. “What happened to superhero movies?” Brody writes. “How did a genre rooted in surprise, strangeness and wonder become a synonym for the normative, the familiar and the everyday?” That’s the surprise, the strangeness, and the wonder that game adaptations must recapture.