Adapting A Video Game Into A Movie: 10 Of The Worst Flops

Video Games

Oct 20

Adapting video games into movies can be a poisoned chalice. They can either hit big at the box office, like A Minecraft Movie, or they can be so bad that everyone involved hopes they’ll disappear from their IMDb credits.

We’ve found the ten worst video game adaptions, and we’ve scored them by IMDb user rankings. How many of these have you watched?

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10) Doom (5.7/10)

There are a couple of directors that should have to write apology notes to video game fans and their mothers for making more than one heinous adaption. Andrzej Bartkowiak is one of them. Doom was a breakthrough franchise, that originally came out in 1993 on the PC. It was the OG first-person shooter and has had expanded into a multi-million-dollar franchise.

But Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is probably trying to forget he starred in the movie adaption. It grossed $58.7 million worldwide against a budget of 70 million. Ouch.

9) Assassin’s Creed (5.6/10)

There was so much wrong with this movie, from Michael Fassbender (German-Irish) trying to pass as Spanish to the dodgy CGI used for the all the sequences in the past. And it looks even messier now, because those special effects have not aged well.

The plot flicks between the past and the modern-day, like the game version of Assassin’s Creed. But the writers never really figured out the future, so it’s kinda snooze-worthy. Most AC fans forget this movie exists.

8) Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (5.5/10)

Not all of these movies are bad, but by the last two (how many movies are there? We’ve lost count), you could tell Paul W.S Anderson was running out of ideas.

Milla Jovovich stuck around for the full set, and Ali Larter was even dragged into this one. But there’s no plot. It’s basically just Alice fighting, and a lot of shaky-cam. You might need motion sickness tablets to watch this.

7) Max Payne (5.3/10 )

This first-person shooter should have been an ideal movie adaption, but 20th century Fox decided to ignore the source material. Mark Walbergh and Mila Kunis phone in their performances on a dire script. The cut scenes on the video games are better.

6) Borderlands (4.7/10)

This video game has such die-hard fans, that some will come out and defend this movie. Cate Blanchett signed up for it, it can’t be that bad? In truth, this should have been a slam dunk, Eli Roth, director and writer had helmed Death Wish & Cabin Fever. But trying to force it into a PG-13 box killed it.

The director tried to serve Borderlands up as a zany kid-friendly comedy. It just didn’t work.

5) Super Mario Bros (4.2/10)

The 1993 version. To be fair to British actor Bob Hoskins, the Italian accent could have been worse. But there was no Super Mario Bros in the plot apart from two guys running around in plumbers outfits. The Princess was called Daisy and she looked more like Madonna in her ‘Like a Virgin’ era than Peach. Audiences didn’t respond well to the lack of fan service, and the movie only grossed $39 million, losing money on it’s 42 million production budget.

4) Street Fighter: Legend of Chun-Li (3.7/10)

Yes, we all know about really bad Street Fighter movie with Jean Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia (that’s 4.1 on IMDb) but, did you know there was a follow up that was even worse? The OG was released in 1994. But in 2009, Romeo Must Die and Doom director Andrzej Bartkowiak attempted to reboot the franchise with Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

A bad attempt at a Kung Fu movie with video game branding.

3) Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (3.6/10)

The follow-up to the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie, which also wasn’t that great (5.8/10), but at least the original had decent action sequences. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is 50% wire work, 50% camera cuts. The only upside is every single character from the video game is crowbarred in there, whether they make the scene better or not. Because it’s a follow up, most of the expensive actors have left the franchise, although James Remar did somehow agree to this script.

2) Bloodrayne (3.0/10)

Director Uwe Boll is the king of the video game flops, because he’s responsible for most of the worst ones, particularly in the horror genre. And in 2005 he got hold of the rights for vampire slash and hack game, Bloodrayne. Meatloaf and Billy Zane have cringeworthy cameos, but poor Ben Kingsley must still have nightmares about the horrible wig the costume department stuck him in.

1) Alone in the Dark (2.4/10)

Alone in the Dark was one of the first survival horror games, releasing in 1992 for the PC, the popular series eventually made its way onto PlayStation and Xbox. Christian Slater and Tara Reid were cast as the leads so at first glance, this should have been okay. But someone went and hired Uwe Boll to direct, so the film turned into an incoherent mess on an epic scale.

To the point where it might top every other bad video game adaption ever. It’s so bad, that it’s worth watching, just to say you’ve seen it.

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