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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Entertainment
Jesse Hassenger

Playing to win: are video game movies replacing superhero blockbusters?

A still from A Minecraft Movie
A still from A Minecraft Movie. Photograph: Warner Bros.

Margot Robbie and Sydney Sweeney are two of the most in-demand actors in Hollywood. As such, they’ve both logged their time in superhero movies of recent vintage (though Robbie’s turn as Harley Quinn is probably better-known than whatever Sweeney found herself doing in Madame Web). It feels notable, then, that in recent weeks they’ve both been connected to multiple projects based on video games. Robbie’s Lucky Chap plans to produce a movie based on The Sims; Sweeney, meanwhile, will produce OutRun, based on a 30-year-old arcade game, and has also signed to star in a movie based on the more recent hit game Split Fiction. Score a bunch of points for the gamers. Is the dawn of gamer cinema finally here?

Regardless of this Hot Lady defection, superhero movies and other comics-based properties will probably stick around for years to come. Marvel still kicks off the summer movie season this week with Thunderbolts, and the MCU series in particular has probably reached (and touched) too many people to go the way of Transformers movies quite yet. Still: games are providing major competition as far as Hollywood’s favorite IP. While Marvel and DC movies have flopped left and right in the past two years, that same period has seen the release of the top three videogame-based movies of all time. That list includes A Minecraft Movie, which is still raking in money even after the Chicken Jockey riots have quieted.

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