The industry is enjoying a wave of acclaimed adaptations that bring successful game franchises to theaters and television.
The Super Mario Bros movie remains the third highest-grossing animated film of all time (second before Inside Out 2 was released last month), the Fallout and Last Of Us series drew millions of viewers, and Sonic The Hedgehog 3 is expected to continue the success of its predecessors when it hits the big screen this Christmas. The wave continues even this week with the debut of Gearbox’s Borderlands movie.
David Alpert, CEO and co-founder of Walking Dead company Skybound, is confident that this is not a passing fad, but the beginning of a much larger movement.
“If you look at comic book movies, the adaptations of the '80s and '90s were generally pretty bad, but 2002's Spiderman kicked off a 20-year run of some of the most successful film and TV adaptations of all time,” he says. Gaming Industry.biz“I don't know if we'll get to 20 years per game, but I think we're certainly looking at a five to ten year streak.”
He continues: “If you look at the history of video game adaptations to film and television, for a long time it was terrible, right? If you go back to the original Street Fighter, the original Mario movie, Doom… they're not good movies, and for a long time Hollywood thought that video games couldn't be adapted.”
So what's changed? Alpert attributes the shift to two factors: first, the evolution of video games themselves. People spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours in these immersive virtual worlds, and the Skybound CEO praises the level of characters, story, and depth of most modern titles.
“If you look at how Dune was ultimately made… I want to see that level of genius in a film adaptation of a game. Then the gold rush will come.”
David Alpert, heading to heaven
Secondly, he points to “a radical technological shift” in film and television production. The original Jurassic Park, he says, had around 600 special effects shots over its entire run, but now this can be found in a single television episode that lasts less than an hour. “That just wasn’t practical even 10 years ago,” he says.
Alpert points to Fallout in particular as a major step forward in video game film adaptations, considering it the most creatively successful to date.
“Obviously Mario did a great deal, my kids liked it, but I didn't want to watch the movie again,” he says. “Whereas I watched Fallout and thought, 'Oh, this is completely faithful to the story, but it's also a good TV show.' I also thought Sonic was a really good film adaptation, surprisingly, but I don't think we've seen a movie yet that does what Fallout has done. I'm hopeful that it will be made, but I don't think we've seen it yet.”
“You look at how Dune was made and you think, 'Wow, that movie is amazing. ' I want to see that same level of awesomeness in a game adaptation in movies. Once that happens, that's when the height of the gold rush will come.”
For years, Skybound has been exploring ways to bring properties from one medium into others, most notably with the various successful comic book adaptations of The Walking Dead and, more recently, the superhero series Invincible, which also began as a comic book. As more and more video game publishers find ways to bring their intellectual property into other forms of entertainment, it demonstrates a shift in the mindset of film and television companies—something that works in Skybound’s favor.
“When Jon (Goldman, co-founder), Robert (Kirkman, co-creator of The Walking Dead) and I met over 20 years ago and said 'hey, we want to make movies and TV shows based on comic books and video games,' people said 'go away,'” he recalls. “Now, people are more receptive to the approach we've already been using.”
Given Skybound’s track record in this space, we wonder what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to adapting a video game IP to another medium. While it’s easier to adapt the story and characters of a book or comic into a movie or TV series, transforming an interactive medium like video games into a passive one comes with the inherent risk of losing appeal.
Jon Goldman tells Gaming Industry.biz It's not something that can be “cooked up in a lab”; The Walking Dead may be best known today for its TV show, but it was already a hugely popular comic book before then, which Goldman says “lays the groundwork” for doing things in other forms of entertainment.
Over the years, we’ve met numerous developers and publishers of all sizes who are confident that their IP can be a hit on the big screen or streaming services, particularly after seeing the recent success stories of Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation and the like. But Goldman urges developers to focus on the foundation of their franchise – the video games themselves – before looking to expand into other realms.
“We meet with young game developers all the time, and you should invest 100% of your resources into making an amazing game,” he says. “If you don't have an amazing game, you have no advantage in making a TV show compared to any completely original proposal from someone else. In fact, if you don't make an amazing game, then TV partners probably won't want to work with you. You need to sell a lot of units, so make a great game.”
Alpert adds that if companies reach the stage where they can expand into other media, they should avoid treating adaptations as derivative products or marketing tools.
“There's this concept of 'primary and secondary,' but you can't think of it like that anymore – everything is primary,” he explains. “So if you have a great program and you make an okay game, players are going to criticize you, and if you have a great game and you make an okay program, no one's going to watch it. You have to have some seal of quality for that to work.”
However, there's no denying that film adaptations can serve as powerful marketing strategies for video games. Sales of Fallout games from years ago skyrocketed as the Amazon Prime Video series gained popularity, as did sales of Mario games around the Nintendo movie. Interestingly, though, it's been back-catalog games that are benefiting from these successes – so far, companies have yet to release a new video game to match their own movie and TV show. Are publishers missing out on a huge opportunity?
“I don't think they care,” Goldman says. “If you compare the size of the video game industry to filmed entertainment, they're already making a ton of money, and video game companies in general have not been good at developing their own IP for filmed entertainment. The other thing you're seeing is that the biggest games are either live services or some kind of multiplayer social game; there's no day or date.”
“If you don't make a great game, your TV partners probably won't want to work with you.”
Jon Goldman, in heaven
He adds that most of the IPs these adaptations have been based on are already hugely popular; when Nintendo releases another Mario game, it doesn't need a movie or TV show to back it up.
Finally, Goldman notes that there is one interesting difference that film, television and comics have compared to video games: the latter have what he describes as a “boundaryless business model.”
“You can go from someone who pays you nothing on a free-to-play game to someone who pays thousands of dollars over the course of a year if they're a fan,” he says. “Meanwhile, the TV model has moved to all-inclusive subscription pricing, which puts a lot of pressure on creators.”
Subscriptions have been on the rise in the gaming sector, with products like Xbox Game Pass, Apple Arcade, and more, but the model has yet to disrupt the industry the way it has TV, film, music, and more. We asked Goldman if he thinks the gaming industry's “boundaryless business model” is immune to such disruption.
“I think it's just different. Microsoft can afford to lose money forever, because games are just a nice little business that they do compared to the rest of their business,” he says. “But for the rest of the industry, it's different than, 'I have a finite cost or budget to do eight episodes or two years of whatever,' versus, 'I'm building a live, operational game that's going to cost more and more as I run it.'”
“Ultimately, if that model is successful, it will put the same downward pressure on developers and creators. I don't foresee the entire industry making that transition very quickly because it's a different industry.”