Unfortunately, this trend is still going strong as of 2017 and there still hasn't been a quality video game movie.
The first example of this era was 2015's Hitman: Agent 47, inspired by IO Entertainment's stealth series that began in 2000 and is still active.
This has the worst Rotten Tomatoes score of any film in this article at 8% and it's easy to see why. Hitman: Agent 47 is dull and uninteresting in every way and doesn't even do the audience the favor of being bad in an entertaining way.
Perhaps the film's most unforgivable sin of all is that it doesn't even have good action scenes, partly because of the overly quick editing. There' are also some dodgy special effects at times, although nothing blatantly obvious.
Basically, there's no reason for anyone to watch this ever. Regardless, it was moderately profitable, making over $80 million worldwide and costing $35 million to produce. Director Aleksander Bach has not worked on a film since according to his IMDB page.
Skip Woods, the writer from the first Hitman film from 2007, returned for this, but it's a total reboot set in a new continuity.
2016 had four big video game movies and the first came out in April. That was a lackluster CGI animated film called Ratchet and Clank, adapted from the platformer and shooter series of the same name. It began in 2002 and the most recent entry came out in 2016 and was exclusive to the PlayStation 4. The style of the film was pretty close to that version of Ratchet and Clank.
The movie was lifeless and boring, and it may entertain small children, but anyone over the age of 8 will likely lose interest quickly. It lamely attempts to be humorous, but almost always falls flat.
The characters are cliche, shallow, and unfunny and the designs are pretty generic. The animation is decent enough, but nothing special. There are a few neat environment designs, but definitely nothing we haven't seen a million times before.
Ratchet is changed a bit from the source material as he loses the arrogance he often displays in the games and is instead portrayed as more of a standard hero.
Overall, Ratchet and Clank is bad, but not even in an interesting or amusing way. I couldn't recommend this to anyone unless they are just desperate to keep a four-year-old quiet for a couple hours.
Its Rotten Tomatoes score is in the basement at 17% and it was a failure financially as well, with its total gross of $13 million being well below its budget of $20 million. This wasn't helped by the fact that the film wasn't marketed that much and many people didn't even know it was coming out.
Ratchet and Clank was directed by Kevin Munroe, who also made the 2007 animated TMNT film as well as the 2011 comic book adaptation Dylan Dog: Dead of Night.
Just a month later comes The Angry Birds Movie, which might be the worst video game movie in this time period. It's painfully unfunny and tedious and the characters are mostly annoying.
This animated film is full of groan-inducing puns and bland pop music and feels incredibly lazy. The Angry Birds mobile games have basically no story, but The Lego Movie proved that you could still make a quality film based on a plotless property, so there are no excuses for the filmmakers here.
The climax is a quite literal translation of the games that involves the birds flinging themselves into buildings and destroying them.
I wouldn't suggest watching this to anyone, even small children.
The Angry Birds Movie has a surprisingly high score on Rotten Tomatoes of 43 percent, which actually makes it the best-reviewed film in this article. It cost $73 million to make and was pretty profitable with a global gross of just under $350 million.
In June, the disappointing Warcraft was released, made by Duncan Jones. He's the director of science fiction films Moon and Source Code, although this is nowhere near the quality of those two works. Partly because of the director's pedigree, many were anticipating this would be the first quality video game movie.
Unfortunately, Jones' idiosyncratic touch is absent here as Warcraft feels like a film made by the studio and lacks personality. No characters are well developed or interesting and the audience is given little reason to care about the high fantasy story about orcs and magic. The dialogue is cliche and the performances are wooden.
The movie is absolutely brimming with CGI and a lot of it looks pretty fake. I can see why they made the orcs CG, but the dwarves, for example, could have been done with prosthetics.
Critics weren't happy with Warcraft either, with it only getting a rather poor 28% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but to be fair it does have a respectable IMDB score of 6.9/10.
At the box office, Warcraft did very badly in the U.S., making $47 million on a hefty $160 million budget. The worldwide gross saved it from being a complete failure, and it ended up with a total of $433 million. This was definitely not enough to continue with a franchise like Universal clearly wanted, but enough to make it the highest grossing video game adaptation to this day.
So while many think of it as a bomb due it's poor American performance, it was actually successful overall due to Asian markets where the games are quite popular.
That December saw the theatrical release of Assassin's Creed based on the Ubisoft games, another film that people thought might break the streak of awful video game adaptations.
This was partly due to the lead Michael Fassbender, who's proven that he's one of the best actors working today with powerful performances in films such as 12 Years a Slave, Shame, and Steve Jobs. Assassin's Creed also had an excellent supporting cast with people like Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, and Michael K. Williams.
But director Justin Kurzel was relatively inexperienced, having only previously made two features that both had much smaller budgets.
Assassin's Creed is easily the best video game movie in this era, but it's still only average at best. Nothing stands out as exceptionally bad and the cast certainly does the best they can, but the film stays boring throughout.
Fassbender's character is named Callum Lynch and was not in the games, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense given how many different characters in the source material they have to choose from.
I've only played the games a bit, but it seems they were way more about the historical part of the story, but the adaptation focuses too much on the modern parts.
The Animus goes from being a sort of Matrix-style chair you lay back in, to a complicated contraption that moves the user all around the room in an attempt to simulate the memory. I can see why they did this to make it more visually stimulating, but it ends up looking silly and not even making complete sense.
Reviews were strongly negative as only 18% of critics approved and it flopped at the box office. Assassin's Creed did especially poorly in North America making only $54 million, but like Warcraft was somewhat saved by the worldwide numbers.
It ended up with a total of $240 million, but considering the production budget alone was around $125 million, Assassin's Creed was a disappointment. It didn't help that this film was released only 5 days after Rogue One, which was a particularly mind-boggling decision made by 20th Century Fox. Going up against Star Wars is always a terrible idea.
The final big budget video game movie to come out so far is Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, in January 2017.
It had been four and a half years since the previous Resident Evil movie, which was by far the longest gap in the series, and many thought there wouldn't be another one.
I was never a huge fan of this series, but I found this one to be slightly less unpleasant than most of the previous installments. The visual style is less over the top and offensive than usual and at times it even resembles a normal movie, but there are still way too many cuts in the action scenes and there's lots of handheld camera work.
The budget was a modest $40 million, the lowest for a Resident Evil movie since the first. Despite this, it made more money than any of the others with a total worldwide gross of $312 million.
There's currently a reboot in development and it will be produced by James Wan, the director of Insidious, The Conjuring, and the upcoming Aquaman movie.
Those are all the video game adaptations that have been released to date, but there are plenty planned out in the years ahead.
The next one with a firm release date is new Tomb Raider, currently scheduled for March 16, 2018. It's the third film based on the property but as a reboot will having nothing to do with the first two. Starring in the title role is Alicia Vikander, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her work in The Danish Girl. She's also appeared in Ex Machina and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The cast also includes Walton Goggins, who was great in Tarantino films Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, and was in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln as well.
The director is Norwegian Roar Uthaug, who has never made an English language movie before. His 2015 film The Wave was Norway's submission for the best foreign film Academy Award.
A trailer was put out this September and received mixed reactions from fans. I thought it looked like it could be entertaining, but nothing amazing for sure.
I was also struck by how similar it looked the most recent incarnations of the Tomb Raider games and I think this was a wise decision. These games are already narrative and cutscene-heavy so it makes sense to borrow from them.
A month later, on April 20, 2018 a movie based on the Rampage games is set to release. The Rampage series of action games started in Arcades in 1986, but hasn't had a release since Rampage: Total Destruction in 2006 for the Wii, PS2, and Gamecube.
Warner Bros. is making a film out of the massively successful Minecraft series, and last we heard, it's supposed to come out on May 24, 2019.
From the little I know, there's not much plot in the games, but that hasn't stopped them from making movies out of Legos and Emojis.
They went with a bit of an odd choice in choosing Rob McElhenney from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as the director.
A second Angry Birds movie that everyone is clamoring for is also coming on September 20, 2019.
One of the most intriguing video game movies without a firm release date is the upcoming Uncharted adaptation. It's been in development since 2009 and was at one point going to see a release in the summer of 2017, but as of now, it's just coming out sometime in 2018.
A somewhat surprising choice was made in casting Spider-Man: Homecoming star Tom Holland as Nathan Drake, which means we'll be getting a younger version of the character than we've seen in the games.
The director will be Shawn Levy and his directing resume is mediocre at best with films like The Internship, all three Night at the Museum movies and the remake of The Pink Panther. On the other hand, he has served as an executive producer on the Netflix series Stranger Things and as a producer on best picture nominee Arrival.
This has a lot of potential as the Uncharted games have fun stories and great characters and are already quite cinematic.
A Sonic The Hedgehog movie is being made by Paramount and it's planned to be a 2019 release. Tim Miller, the director of Deadpool, is attached as an Executive Producer, with a collaborator of his named Jeff Fowler making his directorial debut. Supposedly it will combine live action and CGI, and I'm not sure this is the best idea. This brings to mind things like The Smurfs or Garfield movies and I think making a fully animated version of Sonic would work better.
A Call of Duty film is supposedly in development but no details have been released.
In 2015, a Five Nights at Freddy's movie was announced, but Warner Bros. canceled production sometime last winter. It still might get made, and back in March, there were rumblings that it might end up at upstart production company Blumhouse.
There were reports of a Splinter Cell adaptation starring Tom Hardy but no news has come out about it since early 2017.
A movie adapted from one of my favorite gaming series, Metal Gear Solid is in development, with Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts attached. Skull Island was entertaining enough, but there wasn't anything in it that made me think the director was necessarily suited for Metal Gear.
The games span five decades and are so dense and bizarre that they may be difficult to adapt into two-hour films. This really could go either way, I could see it being terrible or amazing if it even comes to fruition.
With this many video game adaptations in development, I have high hopes that we may finally get the first truly good one.
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