For fans of Mario and Luigi, the moustachioed plumbers who began life as blocky 2D pixels in the early 1980s, the prospect of a $100m feature film stuffed with special effects and Hollywood stars including Chris Pratt, Jack Black and Seth Rogen could feel like defeating the boss in the final level of a platform game.
Now the box-office-busting Super Mario Bros movie, alongside the critically acclaimed success of TV phenomenon The Last of Us, are set to fuel a record decade for gaming adaptations, as film and TV companies turn their sights elsewhere after years of mining comic books for superheroes.
Scathing reviews of the Super Mario Bros film, released on 5 April, have failed to dent its pulling power. In its first week it overtook Warcraft (released in 2016) to become the highest-grossing game adaptation, breaking a long history of big-screen flops for video-game-themed movies. Now $1bn in ticket sales beckons.
Meanwhile, post-apocalyptic thriller The Last of Us upped the TV potential for games after the adaptation of a PlayStation title achieved global critical acclaim and popularity with viewers.
While the gaming industry has an enviable record of creating blockbusters – at launch a decade ago Grand Theft Auto 5 became the fastest entertainment property to gross $1bn, hitting that mark in just three days – the transition of titles to TV and film has, for the most part, been commercially underwhelming.
“Video game intellectual property has flown under the radar as far as the mass market is concerned,” says Sir Ian Livingstone, a co-founder of Games Workshop and creator of multimedia phenomenon Warhammer, which in December struck a deal with Amazon to develop its intellectual property for film and TV. “Traditional entertainment companies have [mostly] paid lip service to the content with their adaptations and not seen the cultural, social or economic impact of the games industry.”
And the industry is a juggernaut: according to research firm Omdia, it will be worth $215bn a year by 2027, overtaking the global pay-TV sector ($213bn) and well ahead of the Netflix-led subscription streaming industry ($159bn).
Once viewed as the preserve of teenage boys in their bedrooms, gaming has become a mainstream phenomenon as digital media – from Instagram and TikTok to Fortnite and social games on mobiles – became part of everyday life.
More than 60% of people aged 16 and over who are online play games at least once a month, and this rises to about 85% of 18- to 24-year-old cinemagoers. Many successful gaming franchises are now old enough to have multigenerational appeal.
“More than half of people are now gamers,” says Karol Severin, co-founder of research company Midia. “One of the reasons adaptations do so well is that we are now, for the first time, in an era where gaming nostalgia comes into play. Parents would once be introducing the kids to stamp collecting; now parents and kids alike have played Pokémon, Super Mario or Dungeons & Dragons. And both parents and kids are excited.”
The cinema industry is still struggling to build up a strong pipeline of Hollywood releases: global cinema revenues are still a long way short of the $42bn peak reached in pre-pandemic 2019. And traditional broadcasters and streamers remain locked in a battle to secure the best content in order to retain, and increase, viewers and subscribers.
With most of the crown-jewel entertainment properties and libraries locked up in deals, from James Bond, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars to Marvel, Pixar and Harry Potter, gaming is the next commercial frontier.
“Comic books and superheroes have been milked for the last 20 years, and that well is perhaps running a bit dry in terms of fresh intellectual property [IP],” says Dominic Tait of Omdia. “Gaming has been relatively underexploited, and now there will be a massive feeling of confidence that future adaptations will do well. It is about how to develop that IP and build those new universes, while maintaining appeal for hardcore gamers and families.”
The stratospheric increase in budgets in recent years and, arguably more importantly, advances in special effects and animation, mean adaptations are of a much higher standard than, say, Bob Hoskins’s outing as Super Mario in 1993.
The 1990s saw just 59 adaptations of games for film and TV, according to Omdia. To date the busiest decade has been the 2010s, when 87 films and 50 TV series were adapted from games. But now film and TV companies are set to spark a gaming gold rush.
There have already been 57 adaptations in the 2020s, and another 40 are being lined up. Netflix is leading the way with the highest number of productions officially greenlit. The streaming platform has even launched games of its own, including spin-offs from its hit Stranger Things series. And while few will achieve the success of Super Mario Bros, the potential is huge.
“Will there be more failures? Absolutely,” says Severin. “But the audience is now there. It is almost too big for a [gaming-based] film or TV show to not gain traction – unless you do something terribly wrong.”
