How Bad Films Make for Good Franchises

Video games and movies share a unique bond. It is almost a guarantee that with the release of a major movie, a video game tying into it will follow. But what about when this cosmic balance shifts the other way around: what about when movies are spawned from video games?

Largely dubbed as the first film to be hatched from a video game was the rare Disney-Nintendo collaboration, the 1993 live-action Super Mario Bros starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo. The film was a resounding failure (Hoskins even claimed it was the biggest mistake of his life). Was it a doomed idea? Could a video game translate well to a narrative driven vehicle? Without the mechanics of play, would fans respond to seeing the characters moving around without their fingertips controlling the action?

Back to the drawing board, Nintendo turned their successful Pokémon anime series feature-length in 1999 to introduce the battle between Mew and Mewtwo, and found their winning formula. While one film soared and one flopped, neither outlook negatively affected the game series. The mere fact that the franchise spanned two platforms, allowing an audience to interact in different ways, fed into the success of both franchise engines.

The video game to movie success continued in 2001. Lara Croft began life as a pixelated character running, jumping, and swimming through mansions and tombs long before Angelina Jolie donned the iconic vest, shorts, and ponytail. While the film – aside from Jolie’s stellar performance – was panned by critics, the marketing collateral for the game series propelled the franchise forwards across the developing consoles and platforms.

Indeed, the latest game was released in 2016 to celebrate 20 years of the character. And the mobile game Lara Croft Go – which won Apple’s 2015 iPhone Game of the Year – proves just how lucrative a cross-platform approach to a franchise can be. In fact, Tomb Raider is one of the best, showing the platform busting power of the character. She’s not alone. Hitman, star of the assassin-led game series following the stealthy character, got the silver screen and slot machine treatment as well, with a Hitman slot available at William Hill.

Hitman as a game proved extremely successful, released on many consoles and platforms, and even living life on the mobile. But the 2007 film starring Timothy Olyphant as Agent 47 was a bust (much like the others - critically, not financially). The series continues to bring Agent 47 to life, despite the cinematic excursion being notoriously panned. Just the fact that the film was made based on the video game was enough to skyrocket the game forwards. A negatively critiqued film is ample collateral for the overall lifetime success of a franchise.     

Video games are known for their diehard fan bases – and movies allow fair weather fans and different audiences to test their toe in the water of the game’s mythos before taking the plunge and becoming a fully-fledged fan. By adapting the video game into a movie, regardless of the critical performance of the movie, it keeps the f