Video game adaptations are enjoying a bit of a renaissance right now. A video game getting made into a movie used to have fans bracing for embarrassment, expecting some cheap, unwatchable slop to be dragged out and projected onto a big screen bearing the name of their favorite games. While there are some modern game movies that are still bad, it at least feels like somebody’s trying to make a good film rather than just trying to cash in on a big name, even if they don’t succeed.
I guess that’s one thing we can thank the constant corporate franchise plays for— companies don’t want to sully their brands with a low-effort adaptation, so we get well-made movies like the Sonic the Hedgehog series and shows like The Last of Us winning awards. But man, there are still some stinkers out there, and even some still being made today. Let’s run through some of the worst video game movies, all while keeping in mind that there are plenty other bad ones we won’t get to touch on.
Doom
Though the 2005 Doom film ended up on our list of best video game adaptations, that was only for one scene. The first-person segment which pays a direct homage to the bloody, demon-hunting FPS games that inspired the film whips ass. The rest of the movie is so paper-thin and uninterested in the pillars of filmmaking like character writing, dialogue, and plot that would make it more substantial than a mock-up you’d see as a proof of concept for a full movie. There were hopes for a second film, but it never came to pass. However, Doom: Annihilation was released in 2019, and that wasn’t a direct sequel, but it was also bad. — Kenneth Shepard
Uncharted
Tom Holland has been Sony’s golden child since his role as Peter Parker in the MCU, so you can see why they’d position him as the face of another hypothetical hit movie franchise. He’s one of the most recognizable young action stars of the past decade, so if they’re trying to turn Uncharted’s Nathan Drake into an iconic movie hero to match his video game status, there are worse picks than Holland. However, where the Uncharted movie falls short isn’t with Holland as Drake, it’s with Mark Wahlberg as Victor “Sully” Sullivan. Where Holland tried his best to capture the swashbuckling spirit of Drake, Wahlberg is playing a character who is wholly unrecognizable from the likable, charismatic father figure that fans know and love. Instead, we get a paranoid bastard who just happens to have his name. The film superficially believes what makes the Uncharted games successful is solely in its big action scenes, several of which it pays homage to like it’s grafting on the best moments of each game into one Frankensteined storyline. As such, it’s content to hand you a bastardized version of the real heart at the center: Nathan Drake’s relationships with the people who follow him to hell and back. — Kenneth Shepard
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is the kind of adaptation that feels like the people making it had, at most, only a passing knowledge for what they were working with. Yeah, it’s a martial arts film about Chun-Li fighting series antagonist M. Bison and there are other characters who vaguely resemble Street Fighter heroes, but otherwise it’s just a mess of incoherent plot strictly there to facilitate flying fists and spinning kicks. There’s also a wild subplot about M. Bison transferring his consciousness into his unborn child after killing his pregnant wife. What the fuck are we doing here? — Kenneth Shepard
Uwe Boll’s video game movies
A big reason video game movies have a bad reputation is because Uwe Boll was directing a handful of them in the early-2000s that were so bad they collectively turned the public against them.. Boll’s shoddy work on movies like Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, and Far Cry became synonymous with why video game movies shouldn’t exist. He wasn’t working on huge franchises that would have had a lot of money behind them (with Far Cry maybe being the exception, though the series has become far bigger since the 2008 film), which meant he churned out a bunch of low-budget slop that set the tone for years of people groaning when they heard a movie adaptation was coming, even if he wasn’t involved. There were even petitions asking him to retire back in 2008. Boll eventually retired in 2016 and pivoted to the restaurant business but has since returned to filmmaking. — Kenneth Shepard
Warcraft
Listen, I actually like this movie…or at least remember liking it when I mindlessly plopped into a seat at the theater to watch it. I had no affinity for the games that inspired it and came away from the film thinking, “Well, that was a fun time.” However, I literally do not remember a thing that happened, suggesting its plot and characters were either so bland I spaced on them or so bad that I repressed them. I’ll leave the truth of the matter to you all, but years later I can confirm that Warcraft did not turn me into a convert, or betray any real love for the games it adapted, and that is perhaps the greatest sin of one of these adaptations. It’s just kind of there. —Moises Taveras
Borderlands
Hoo boy, this one is just depressing. The brand-new Borderlands movie starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Black, and Ariana Greenblatt isn’t the kind of bad video game movie that will eventually become a cult classic—it’s just plain bad. It’s not even bad enough to inspire hate-watches or spawn memes like Madame Web, which could afford it a sort of second life after what will inevitably be a disappointing box office performance and that’s largely because it is so thoroughly uninspired. The film, which strips the fun out of a universe that already teeters on the precipice of being irreparably annoying, has dialogue that feels like it was written by an AI trained on the tamest corner of Reddit, CGI that deadens a world steeped in color, and performances that have “I am collecting a check” written all over them. I don’t think time will be kind to Borderlands, and it shouldn’t be. — Alyssa Mercante
Hitman
Agent 47 cannot catch a break in the film department. Both attempts to make a Hitman movie have been dreadful. The first attempt in 2007 was dragged for its awful writing and was so poorly received that a sequel was canceled. The 2015 reboot Hitman: Agent 47 didn’t fare any better, and maybe it’s time for big companies to realize that this might not be the video game series to adapt to a big-budget action film. Hitman is doing well enough as a video game and not everything needs to aspire to a piece of every side of the entertainment business. — Kenneth Shepard
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
While The Super Mario Bros. Movie has been a resounding success at the box office, the Chris Pratt-led animated film feels like the natural endpoint of a group of suits trying to stuff every focus-tested idea and banal reference into a 90-minute movie. It has its moments like Bowser’s now-viral “Peaches” song and the titular brothers’ early escapades in Brooklyn before they’re isekai’d into the Mushroom Kingdom, but most of it boils down to references some cynical suit believes will make long-time Mario fans clap. It’s beautifully animated and has some good jokes, but it stops short of including the heart and soul that makes Mario so beloved after all these years. — Kenneth Shepard
Injustice
The Injustice movie is both a DC comic and NetherRealm fighting game adaptation and manages to do poorly by both its source materials. The animated Injustice movie is too short to tell the story it’s adapting. Rather than making a series of films to more effectively tell the story of Superman’s descent into fascism, it takes a hard left turn in the final minutes to wrap up the story quickly. I’ll never forget the whiplash of watching this film and realizing that a lot of its strange decisions like killing off The Flash, who typically played an important role in the Injustice storyline, were all meant to make one film in what could have easily been several. If we’d gotten a series of Injustice films rather than one that hurriedly wrapped up a years-long comic and video game series in a brisk 78 minutes, we could look back on it much more fondly. — Kenneth Shepard
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
I have only walked out of a movie twice in my life. Once was when I was nine years old and saw Jackie Chan’s The Tuxedo because my mother dragged me and my brother out of the theater because she was scared the characters were going to start having sex and she’d have to explain that a few years earlier. The second time was in 2021 when I saw Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. And that’s all I have to say about that. — Kenneth Shepard
DOA: Dead or Alive
Fighting game movies are some of the most hit-or-miss when it comes to adaptations. You have an easy setup for a lot of action, usually by staging a tournament that attracts a bunch of larger-than-life personalities, but stringing it together with a proper plot is the biggest obstacle for these movies. DOA: Dead or Alive is a prime example of what essentially amounts to actors cosplaying different fighters, beating each other up, and a loose plot barely holding it all together. The Dead or Alive cast gives performances that would barely pass for the worst amateur film you’ve seen, and when the source material was giving them nothing to work with, who can really blame them? — Kenneth Shepard
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Depending on who you ask, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is either an abomination or an underappreciated gem. The animated film wore the Final Fantasy brand but is pretty removed from any RPGs that spawned it. Spirits Within was praised for its animation in 2001, but beyond that, it’s generally considered an incomprehensible mess. It bombed so hard at the box office that Square shut down its Square Pictures branch, though it still lives in the hearts of some who consider it a cult classic. Also, damn, looking at the cast list, it had a pretty stacked line-up. Ming-Na Wen? Alec Baldwin? Donald Sutherland? The Spirits Within is wild to look back on. — Kenneth Shepard
Assassin’s Creed
If I will give the live-action Assassin’s Creed movie anything, it was that its depiction of the series’ virtual reality simulator the Animus was a pretty interesting way to make what could have been a mostly benign recreation of the source material into something more compelling on film. Instead of having actor Michael Fassbender lay on a bed and dream about his ancestor’s past, the film portrays the Animus as a claw-like machine that allows protagonist Cal to completely recreate the movements and actions of the memories he relives. When he jumps onto a target in his memories, he is able to fully reenact the scene in the real world. It lets the movie do some interesting things as it flashes between realities, rather than spending too long in the past you forget about the present day. But Assassin’s Creed falls into the same problems the games do in that its lack of commitment to one side means both the past and present can feel shortchanged by one another. That’s only more apparent in the movie, as it feels needlessly convoluted as it tries to bring in the series’ lore baggage into what could’ve been a much simpler, accessible film. — Kenneth Shepard
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