Hollywood doesn’t always get things right. And sometimes it just doesn’t get them right first time. One thing it certainly messed up in the 1990s was video game adaptations.
Studios saw the rise of consoles like the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis (the Mega Drive for us UK bunch), noticed kids were spending more time mashing buttons than rewinding VHS tapes and thought: “Let’s turn this into cinema!”
The result was a decade of 90s video game movies that ranged from entertaining camp to outright unwatchable disasters.
But they died so the films of the future could live. More on those in a moment.
Plumber Drowns His Sorrows Over Arrogant Directors
The first, and still most infamous, was Super Mario Bros. (1993). On paper, adapting the most recognizable video game in history looked like printing money. In practice, it was a damn fever dream. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo played Mario and Luigi in a dystopian, Blade Runner-esque alternate reality.
But the shoot was so chaotic that Hoskins and co got drunk EVERY DAY to cope with the madness. And even the lovely Fiona Shaw turned to drink, too.
“Bob used to get special whiskey sent from England – single malts – and we would drink those copiously in his caravan,” she told Inverse.
Hoskins revealed in 2007 how bad things were, telling The Guardian: “The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario. It was a ******* nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! ******* nightmare. ******* idiots.”
The movie bombed, critics hated it, and Nintendo fled Hollywood for decades. The biggest problem for me was it didn’t resemble the video game I loved. At all. Still, it has a cult following today – though mainly from people who enjoy ironic movie nights.
They finally seemed to make a decent Mario Bros movie in 2023. But that was animated. So it doesn’t count.
Van Damme That Was A Lot Of Money For One Person
A year later, Street Fighter (1994) arrived, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme (who took home a quarter of the whole movie budget – a cool $8 million) and Raul Julia, who would die before the film’s release.
And that meant a post-credits scene where (spoilers) his character, M Bison, is revived from death was cut from the theatrical release (but remains for home video versions).
Van Damme chewed scenery while Julia gave the performance far too much dignity for a script this ridiculous. The movie made money (almost $100 million on a $35m budget) but was universally mocked.
And yet, it has become a nostalgic guilty pleasure of 90s video game movies for fans who grew up quoting “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life…but for me, it was Tuesday…”
Kill Them All! (But not all of them)
Then came Mortal Kombat (1995), the closest thing the 90s got to a successful adaptation. It wasn’t good, exactly, but it captured the over-the-top martial arts tone of the games, delivered a killer soundtrack (is it in your head yet?), and had enough fun fights to make audiences cheer.
But what it didn’t have was an R-rating, which a lot of people wanted. The producers wanted a PG-13 rating so younger viewers (like myself, which made up a considerable part of the video game fanbase) could see it without having to sneak into cinemas.
So they studied the guidelines and talked extensively with the ratings board, and learned that the PG-13 rating forbids onscreen death. Which is troublesome in a game/movie about killing your opponent in a tournament to the death. But then they discovered the rule only applied to human characters. Hurrah! So they had all the deaths of non-humans take place on screen, and kept the human fatalities off it.
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They Got So Close Yet Still So Far
The sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997), promptly ruined the goodwill with some of the worst special effects of the decade. The film became the highest-grossing adaptation of a video game before being surpassed by Pokémon: The First Movie in 1998.
By the end of the era of 90s video game movies, Hollywood still hadn’t cracked the code. Games were interactive, immersive experiences; movies were linear narratives. Translating one into the other without losing what made it exciting was nearly impossible, it seemed. The output from the decade left us with little more than oddities that are curious to look back on – though some people will admit to liking them. And why not. There is joy in these camp and curious movies, even if they weren’t super faithful to the source material.
But these misfires laid the groundwork. The failures showed studios there was an audience willing to buy a ticket, even if the film was bad. Without Mario, Street Fighter, and Mortal Kombat, there would be no Detective Pikachu or The Last of Us adaptations today.
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And as disappointing as Mortal Kombat was in ’95, look at the latest version from 2021. It’s fantastic. Sure, not everyone agrees, but it finally felt like a good representation of the game. Even if the actual MK tournament was missing. Lol. And a sequel has already been greenlit – with some actors signed on for FOUR movies.
And Street Fighter has a new movie that’s just started filming as I write this, apparently starring Jason Momoa as Blanka, alongside rapper/actor 50 Cent and WWE wrestlers Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns. Could be good, could be shit. Who knows?
The 90s video game movies got it wrong, but they proved that the genre belonged on the big screen.
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