There were no roadmaps for adaptations of video games when the Super Mario Brothers movie was created. Even as a game, there few roadmaps on how to handle its initial success. In its own foolhardy way, Hollywood decided to pit its funds on creating the first major adaptation of the gaming classic. The game had little in the way of story but lots of substance. It was like paint before it hit the canvas, and a group of intrepid filmmakers took that to heart… and presumably the bank had it worked out for them. Basically, it was a gamblers dream. On an estimated budget of 48 million, the film would flop in the domestic box office, 10 million short of breaking even. With this being the beginning of not only Hollywood video game adaptations, but also a never ending slew of critical and financial failure on these gaming gambles, I decided it would be the perfect place to create a rubric on which I could grade every other gaming film. Why? The short explanation would simply be that since games were still primitive when this film was created, the filmmakers took it upon themselves to create their own narrative and re-imagine characters and the world the inhabited. It’s the perfect place to start looking at how they adapt properties from the most primitive to the very distinct properties and how that distortion creates new works of art. Super Mario Bros. the movie is so far removed from its origin that every gaming film can be contained within it. No gaming film escapes its disparate grasp on its source, nor does any film try so desperately to entice fans by selling them a new vision of something familiar. With this rubric, I plan to review every Hollywood gaming film, in order, since the Super Mario Bros movie was released. I have some experience reviewing films in this way, having reviewed with a friend, live on twitch, every James Bond film in order, so I know I am in for a gauntlet. But now that I am an aspiring game developer and film enthusiast, I see no other path before me. We are about to do what countless fans have done before me… lets throw rocks in glass houses.

First, adaptation of one media to another requires a completely different rubric for grading than an original creation. With this in mind, we have to define the aspects of games that matter beyond the obvious input of the player. We can imagine the director, the writer, the set designer, the cinematographer, and countless other “deciders” as the person with the controller in their hand. They are the star on Twitch, and we are along for their play, for all their failures and successes. I have found that the greatest game-to-film adaptation is the Street Fighter II The Animated Movie and you can read an ancient entry as to why here. But animated features have the power to create literally anything, they don’t need to rebuild the game out of our actual reality. Because of this, the rubric will concern itself with only live action films. At the time when Super Mario Bros The Movie was released, digital effects had 1/100th the level of realism we see today. The construction of the film relied almost completely on practical effects, everything from crazy outfits and makeup, to foam rocks and animatronics. They created everything about this film from the truly limited background of Super Mario 1, 2, 3 and World. So many of these games, when you really go back to them, relied heavily on your imagination to fill in the gaps, and maybe that’s why this film gets a bad rap. Everyone had a different idea of what made Super Mario Bros, but not a single person ever imagined anything like this film. But that’s exactly why, even though it’s the first, it might be the best live action video game film ever made, which is exactly why I wanted to base my rubric on it.

To break down my argument for Super Mario Bros and make a basis for all the game-to-film adaptations we will be looking at the following: Originality, Preservation, Construction, Delivery, and finally Fan Service. When adapting any work, there is going to be a sense of push in pull between preserving the work as it was created and pursuing new concepts to inject into your adaptations, Preservation vs Originality. In the case of Super Mario Bros, it appears that only the framework was preserved, like someone came into the house of Miyamoto and decided to only keep the wood holding up the roof. But when it comes to adapting a two-dimensional world held together by imagination and video game logic, reality beckons for more. At this point in the history of Mario, especially the Mario exported to the US, he spent very little time talking. He was a silent hero, he and his brother. In the afterschool animation, he would talk wise, but in most cases, he just reacted and played the hero, where Luigi was basically the same, only much more cautious. For a while, this show even had a live action section that just made short physical gags based around them being italian plumbers living in Brooklyn, which is about as paper thin as it gets. When Hollywood went full tilt into bringing the brothers into the tinseltown, they needed more fleshed out characters and actors who could bring them to life. To be fair to the film creators, the house of Miyamoto was founded on a little grey box not yet capable of bringing to life the complexity of reality, but what little it did bring to life was explosive in the minds of kids and adults alike.

On construction and delivery, the world of the Super Mario game and the Super Mario film were possibly too far apart. The original was bright and colorful, the live action gritty and greasy. Looking back, there was ample reason for them to make so many original design choices. At the time, the biggest family blockbuster in the realm of cartoon characters being brought to live action was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the films had drastically changed the tone in the same way. Granted there was a disparity between the cartoon and the comic, the vast majority of kids that the film was intended for knew only of the cheerful animated world. The turtles films would go on to be smash hits, not to mention other hits that may not have been for kids like Batman ‘89 and even Aliens. It’s hard not to recognize this when reviewing this filme, even at the time, it would have been particularly obvious. So why does this film have such a fraught legacy? By most accounts, this would have been by the numbers; a safe bet for people in the business. I don’t want to get into the weeds regarding all the different hiccups about the production of the film, largely we are concerned with the final product. This will be true of all the reviews forthcoming.

The crux at the core of the game-to-film adaptation is placed between how close to its source material the film is and how good of a film it is on its own. It’s judged on two different planes simultaneously, which is a bit unfair, but also completely understandable. It is a work that was created in a completely different realm. Gaming films almost always cannot stand on their own without a major injection of the filmmaker’s own creativity. Unlike when adapting books, film marketing often leans into the fact that it started as a game. It’s hard for me as a long time gamer to really separate the film from its origin, to imagine what non-gamers see on the screen. Still, the marketing sabotages recognizing it as a film on its own, even for newcomers. But that is really only the case for stand alone films, not those that become a franchise on their own. Filmmakers discovered that when the film stretches the cannon so far away from its origin point, that you can create your own cannon. This is most obvious with the Resident Evil series, which is mostly unrecognizable to game fans after the second film. It should be understood that the game series was and is as vast as the film series, more so even. The popularity of the continuing story of Resident Evil only made the films more popular, despite having little to do with the ongoing source material. This is all to say that the film can eventually survive without input from the game and the game can continue without recognizing the film. They can become independent properties and rely on each other when needed.

In the end, what truly buoys these films, especially in the beginning, is the fans of the source material. They are a key part of the demographic, but really only the base. Both the owners of the games and the creators of the film hope to create synergy, selling tickets and games in tandem. If the film doesn’t impress, the game sales won’t take, even if the film is loved by fans. The fans have already purchased the product, both in this case, and thus the circle is complete. Oddly, despite all the care to add Fan Service in the Super Mario Bros movie, it seems as if it all backfired. Either the fan service didn’t catch fans’ favor, or it wasn’t understandable to first timers. Some people think that fan service should be both explosive and silent, like an explosion in space. It should be recognized easily by the gamers, but not disturb or perplex the normies. I can’t say for certain if I feel this is true at the moment, but I hope to discover this by the end of this series. Looking at Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, I would say this is actually largely true. None of the fan service would be obvious to anyone who isn’t a fan of the game. It’s completely foreign yet instantly understandable. In the opening, we learn how Sagat gets his scar and we see Ryu launch his Hadouken. Both of these things are integral to the world of Street Fighter, it wouldn’t be the same thing without it, but a film version could technically ignore it and still get the story across. Fan Service translated into the film is part of the DNA of the original property in most cases, it defines the world. That is the power of Fan Service.

I am starting out this series in a defensive mode; I am here to change the perception of game-to-film adaptations. I think as an experiment, especially in hindsight, some of these films deserve recognition as honestly good films. Some of these films may have not satisfied the cinema critic, but had a huge impact on the audience for which they were created. These films evolved alongside the games themselves. Film was so much more sophisticated in the beginning, and games became more and more sophisticated, mimicking it’s older sibling as it grew up. And in turn, in some cases, film sought to understand gaming; to transform it into something people could recognize in a new form. I am not going to try and ignore the many cases in which these films were primarily a cash grab, like putting Urkel on a backpack (google it kids), but that doesn’t mean that they lack all merit. Still, who knows? There are many films on this list I have not seen (the list). But I love games, and I love movies. I plan on being the very best, like no one ever was, and make a film that passes the test, and impresses everyone. To do that, you have to start by recognizing your past for what it is to see what it could be.