8 Pretty Good Movie Adaptations of Games

Before everyone gets all flustered, let’s preface the gallery with this: When you make a film adaptation of anything it’s going to have to leave out some major plot points and events. These movies are still good movies that just so happen to have been based on a game that everyone loves.

One of the better movies based on a game, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within[1], took the intelligent path of making their film an animated one. The level of skill that it took to make this film is unparalleled. It may have came out in 2001 but the graphics are still pretty damned great.

This Silent Hill adaptation came out in 2006. The cast was amazing and it actually met with some critical praise. The film captured some of the terror that the game mastered, which still makes a pretty damned scary movie.

Timothy Olyphant, of Justified and Go fame, played Agent 47 in the Hitman adaptation. It’s hard to make a film based on such a cumbersome game series, but they did it by not trying to tackle the whole canon at once. The same thing that Marvel did with their universe: Bite sized pieces.

By the time they made the film version of Resident Evil, the series was already old and had a large following. There was no way that you could make them all happy, but I think that they made most at least a little happier. Once again, instead of biting off more than they could chew they worked on the beginning. They made it episodic, in a way, and that made the story much easier to swallow.

Casting Donnie Darko in the title role for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time could have been a big mistake, but Jake Gyllenhaal shone in the role of the Prince. He chewed up the scenery and truly acted where he could have been the typical action hero and kicked ass across the desert.

The first Tomb Raider movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider made millions. It helped that they had Angelina Jolie in the role of Lara, but it also helped that she had a great cast to work off of. This may not have been the most loyal adaptation but what was made of it was quite the big screen spectacle.

With the Mortal Kombat movie, the campier the better. They really captured the spirit of the original game. Mortal Kombat wasn’t created as an ultra realistic game but a fighting game with as much gore and violence as possible. This film is quite possibly the closest to its videogame predecessor.

The Super Mario Bros. movie may not have been the best thing since sliced bread, as many had hoped it would be. It’s still an interesting retelling of the origin of the characters. Everyone may remember this movie as being over the top and pretty campy to a fault, but look at the people that it took to make such an oddly surreal film. You’ve got Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi, and Dennis Hopper as King Koopa. This movie should be considered a classic just based on the talent that they had at their disposal and exactly what they decided to do with said talent.