How video game movies got good: A Post Games bonus

Hey everybody, it is Christopher Thomas Plant.

As you can tell, this is not an episode of The Besties.

The guys very kindly allowed me to do a feed drop of my new show, Post Games.

I'll keep this brief so we can get right to it.

Post Games is a show about how and why we love video games.

Think of it like a NPR, BBC, New York Times audio show, but for the stuff that we love.

I've talked to experts on not safe for work and lewd games.

I chatted with the relatively new CEO of Atari about how the hell Atari is making a comeback.

I chatted with Dunkie about how he changes opinions on video games and his approach to criticism.

This week's episode just is so special and feels very in line with Besties, and that's why I chose to feed drop this one.

It's with Patrick H.

Willems, the video essayist and filmmaker, and it's about the past 30 years of video game adaptations.

Like I said, the sort of stuff that I think you, a besties listener, will love.

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You can get free show notes at post.games.

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For subscribers, next Monday, I'm publishing an audiobook version of the history of Street Fighter the movie.

And let me tell you, it's sick.

I can't wait to share it.

I will not be doing this every week.

This is a one-off thing, but I really appreciate my fellow besties giving me a chance to share this show that I love so much.

I hope you love it too.

Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Post Games, a podcast about how and why we love video games.

I am your host, Chris Plant.

Thank you so much for being here.

The first video game to movie adaptation was Mario.

Not the 2024 mega hit starring Chris Pratt.

And not the infamous Blockbuster Bomb of the early 1990s either.

The first video game to movie adaptation was Super Mario Bros.

The Great Mission to Rescue, which hit Japanese movie theaters in July 1986, around the same time as Americans were just beginning to find the NES and its iconic plumber on shelves at Walmart.

All of which is to say, video game movie adaptations have been around as long as modern video games.

Toss in TV adaptations?

You can go all the way back to Pac-Man.

Though only in the past few years has the video game adaptation transcended decades of infamy, where studios used to treat these adaptations as quick cash grabs meant to be filmed with one hand while plugging your nose with the other.

The game adaptations of today, they attract billions of dollars in box office gross, critical praise, and star talent in front of the camera and behind it.

So what changed?

How did we go from Mario being box office poison to one of the most valuable movie IPs in history?

This week on Post Games, how video game movies got good.

We have an extended interview with the filmmaker and video essayist Patrick H.

Willems, in which we together make sense of 30 years and five distinct eras of video game adaptations.

Act one, the doomed decades.

Act two, the Hollywood hits.

A Patreon bonus, Patrick sticks around to speculate on the future of video game adaptations, including no fewer than 46 movies in active development.

And of course, Act 3, the news of the week.

A few trailers before the main attraction.

Postgames is now on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

So check it out there.

If you like the show, listen for free on RSS.

Or if you love the show and you want all of the bonus content and you want to keep this thing going, plus no ads, check us out on patreon.com forward slash postgames.

And it looks like we still have a few trailers left.

So you go grab the popcorn and candy.

I'll save you a seat.

Act one: The Doomed Decades.

I am thrilled about today's guest because, frankly, I'm a fan.

It is filmmaker and video essayist Patrick H.

Willems.

I first came across Patrick's work in the early 2010s when he and a troop of actors, writers, and filmmakers would create these spot-on parodies of Breaking Bad and Batman and X-Men, the latter of which, I should note, They created in the style of Wes Anderson a full decade before AI AI would turn a great idea into an utterly soulless trend.

Patrick parlayed the viral success of those parody videos into a YouTube channel where he, for years, has published film essays that are themselves treated like short films.

They have sets, scripts, and even side stories.

Their cinematography, their editing, their score, often subtly or when called for quite bluntly, match their topic.

In a medium like the YouTube video essay, where the audience can sometimes mistake scrappy and low effort for, quote, true and authentic, Willems and his team take pride in making something that you'd find on a top-tier streaming service, the kind with gajillions of dollars, if only they bothered funding thoughtful film criticism.

Fortunately, you can find his work on a slightly smaller service, though one that punches way above its weight, and that is Nebula.

Anyway, alongside his film essays on YouTube and Nebula, Willems has directed films, including the feature-length Night of the Coconut and the upcoming short, The Dinner Plan.

On top of all of this, Patrick is an expert on video game movie adaptations, and of course that's why he's here.

Last year, he published a video essay titled When the Faithful Adaptation is Actually Worse, and it is a must-watch.

After, of course, you listen to this episode.

We're going to condense 30 years of video games.

And to help, I have divided video game adaptations into five discrete eras.

So think of me as the automated car and you as the tour guide who is pointing at the window, explaining what the hell that we're seeing.

Before this, when I was looking through the list of every video game adaptation, or at least like film adaptations, and I was trying to think like, okay, how would I divide this into eras?

And so I'm glad you have already gotten ahead and you've broken it up there.

We'll start with the beginning which I'm calling this the Zeitgeist era and this is 1993 to 1999 and the Zeitgeist era includes the original movie adaptation Super Mario Brothers, Double Dragon, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Wing Commander.

And first, does that seem like a good starting place for you?

Yes, yes.

I was really wondering, would this first era carry over into the 2000s?

But looking at it now, I think I know exactly why that is the cutoff point.

And so I think this makes sense for the first era because This is this thing where video games have now like become, especially with like the home consoles, they've just become such a major cultural thing.

But also the games being adapted are, I would say in general, pretty simple on a narrative level level, and where the movies basically have to add a lot of material, like story material, character material, because the games are providing so little.

And I think Super Mario Brothers, the Rocky Morton Annabelle Jankle film, is the ultimate example of this.

They just back then did not care about fans wanting faithful adaptations.

They're just like, whatever.

This silly game, it's like a starting point or whatever, but like, who cares if the film like barely resembles the source material because the source material is pretty stupid.

And while now it's obvious, and we'll get into this in a minute, now like fidelity to the source material is like paramount.

Now it's like we must please the fans.

And back then, it's, yeah, whatever.

It's just a bunch of like boys.

Like, who really cares?

I was one of those boys and I was grumpy-ish that I liked the Mario Brothers movie as a kid.

But it's funny funny looking back on it because, yeah, the source material is two or three bullet points that could be written on the side of an arcade cabinet to get a drunk person to play.

And like that, that there was ever a sense of loyalty to that text.

It's an incredible thing.

But you mentioned the directors of the Mario Brothers movie.

Can you paint a bit of a picture of 1993 and what Hollywood is like and why a studio says, let's turn Mario into a movie?

The Mario Brothers movie movie is such a bizarre thing because it originated with the director Roland Joffey, who had made like the Killing Fields and The Mission.

He got the rights to it and produced the movie, but you just think, why would this guy who makes very serious films about very serious subject matters?

And I think his movies are too serious.

His movies

are largely like, I think, kind of dull because they're so self-serious.

I'm like, why did this guy decide he was the one to shepherd Mario to the big screen?

But I think a lot of this era, it's like, I think one of the just the major pivot points in like Western cinema is Tim Burton's Batman in 1989.

Obviously, there had been IP adaptations before that.

You know, there was like Robert Alton's Popeye and stuff like that, but Batman was such a cultural phenomenon, just such a massive blockbuster.

It was the biggest film of that that year that I do think that,

like, truly, like, like Western cinema, you can look at it as like pre- and post-Batman.

And that's the thing of, like, okay, this is a property that was, as much as it has a massive adult audience, was originally conceived for children and has huge appeal for children.

And what if we took that property that has a huge built-in younger audience and pumped a ton of money into it and made it this cultural event.

And that is still what happens every month to this day.

Batman happens and then

video games have become a major thing.

And so I think the studios logically looked at this and said like, oh, here's another thing with a massive younger audience.

We might as well jump on that.

You described this playbook.

And what's so strange looking back on this list of all of the game adaptations is I was sure that there were dead periods.

Periods of, oh, we all took a break and then we came back to this idea.

And you're right.

People have quite literally been running this playbook non-stop since Mario.

There is no off

year, basically.

Yeah.

It's strange.

Okay, so you mentioned the idea of creating a faithful adaptation to appease fans or to appeal to fans.

To lay a little bit more foundation, what do you mean when you call an adaptation unfaithful to its original work?

I mean,

that is potentially a very big question when it comes down to like,

is it a matter of recreating the experience of playing the game, but in a non-interactive medium?

Is it about just sticking to the story?

I think in terms of like how most viewers or fans would look at like, is this faithful or is it not?

I think a lot of it comes down to is the general narrative similar or pretty close to the original one.

And then I think a big part of it is the iconography.

Do the characters look like the characters?

Does the world look like the world?

And that's where you look at like Super Mario Brothers,

nothing looks like what it does in the game other than like, okay, Bob Hoskins has a mustache.

And then in the third act, he dresses in like red and blue and has overalls on.

But like nothing there looks like the game.

The world of it bears zero resemblance to the game at all.

But then you look at Paul W.S.

Anderson's Mortal Kombat in 1995.

And immediately there you can tell, okay, Paul W.S.

Anderson and a filmmaker that I'm not crazy about generally.

but this is my favorite thing he's ever made.

And part of it has to do with the fact that like, I just loved this movie when I was like in second grade and watched it endlessly, so I have a lot of nostalgia for it.

But the Mortal Kombat movie from 1995, that I think is

a very faithful adaptation.

And a big part of it is just the characters look like the characters.

You know, in the game, Scorpion and Sub-Zero have these very specific colored ninja costumes, and then There they are in the movie dressed the same way.

Goro is there with his four arms.

Like the special moves, Scorpion's spear move.

It's there.

So it's like they looked at the game, made a list of what are all the things that people like in these, and let's put them all in the movie.

It feels like it was made by a fan of the game, or games.

I think there were like at least a couple of Mortal Kombat games out by 95.

Like it's made by a fan who's trying to like aim the movie at other fans of the game, which is pretty different than most of the other video game adaptations of that time, pretty different than Steven D'Souza's Street Fighter.

I mean, honestly, considering Paul W.S.

Anderson is going to make a lot more video game movies starting in a few years in the next era,

his follow-up ones are not as faithful to the source material as that Mortal Kombat is.

Yeah, you're right.

We will be getting much deeper into the Paul W.S.

Anderson canon in just a moment.

But before we wrap up the Zeitgeist era, what happens with the other video game adaptations following Mario?

Because Mario is a bomb.

And yet, you mentioned Stephen D'Souza's Street Fighter, Paul W.S.

Handers Immortal Kombat, Wing Commander, Double Dragon.

What is the pivot that gets those things greenlit and into theaters?

That is a good question because clearly it's not like Hollywood Studios looked at Mario bombing and said, that's it for video game adaptations.

I think they just decided that's it for Mario.

But this is, I mean, it's, this is the whole weird thing about video game adaptations because

I feel like right now, not sorry to skip to like a much later era.

But right now, Hollywood seems to be in this

in this mindset that video games are like

superheroes, where it's, it's a genre.

And like people, if they like the genre, people will like show up for these when really...

Saying video game adaptations is like saying literary adaptations.

If a movie based on a book bums, studios aren't like, I guess people hate books.

Never going to adapt a book again.

But yeah, Super Mario Brothers, that is a like colorful Nintendo platforming game.

You don't see any more colorful Nintendo platformers get adapted for a while.

And then also Nintendo just became really careful about letting their games be adapted.

But then Double Dragon, it's like a beat-'em-up game.

Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are fighting games, which are just fundamentally so extremely different from what Mario is.

So yeah, I think it's just one of those things where it's like, look, people people like action movies.

And then also, perfectly with Mortal Kombat, that's this period when more and more like Hong Kong movies are being brought over to the U.S.

And there's an increasing interest in like martial arts.

Like this is around the time that Jackie Chan starts properly coming to America.

And so I think Mortal Kombat makes perfect sense where it's like, this is a super popular game.

It's also just like such a like kind of pure action movie.

And also it has these connections to this type of action movie that is really like picking up steam.

You saw me going towards the hoop, and you just threw it right in the air because the next era, the grown-up games era, is what I'm framing it as.

It's funny you mentioned 2000 as maybe the cutoff point.

I actually start this one at 2001 to 2008, and the two icons of the era are Paul W.S.

Anderson and you Bull.

We'll talk about both of them.

And for this, I have Laura Cropped, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Evil, Silent Hill, Doom, Postal, and it ending in 2008 when Yubull releases two movies the same year, Dungeon Siege and Far Cry adaptations.

And I'm sure that there are people who are like hardcore video game people listening to this and going, they made a Dungeon Siege movie or a Far Cry movie?

Starring Jason Statham.

Can you tell people, like, who is Paul W.S.

Anderson as a person?

I mean, Paul W.S.

Anderson,

it is kind of funny because he's this British filmmaker who he kind of broke out with a kind of like lower budget, but like stylish kind of action-y movie in the early 90s, I believe, called Shopping.

That actually was like the movie that launched Jude Law.

I feel like everyone forgets that Paul W.S.

Anderson really kicked off Jude Law's career.

A star maker is what they say about Paul W.S.

Anderson.

But it was a classic thing because I feel feel like a really key thing about this first era of video game adaptations is that they were not putting A-list talent on them.

The directors, they were like Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankle.

They were kind of like interesting visual stylists who had worked on Max Headroom.

And then Stephen D'Souza, who directed Street Fighter, he wasn't really a director, but he had written a lot of major action movies like Die Hard.

And Paul W.S.

Anderson, that's the move of like, oh, he made this like stylish, low-budget movie.

Now let's bring him into this studio system to make like a bigger movie.

I think Mortal Kombat among video game fans, that was like the one video game adaptation that had like done it and that people liked.

And the movie was a success.

It spawned a sequel that Paul W.

S.

Anderson did not direct that people did not like.

But so I feel like at that point, it's like, okay,

he's the only guy who's figured out how to make this work.

So then he, and he has a bit more clout and a bit more power.

And then also also then he, I can't remember exactly when they got together, but then you've got the fascinating relationship with him and Mila Jovovich,

where she, you know, they're married and she just stars in all of his movies for the next like 30 years.

Paul W.S.

Anderson's movies, I, for me, have grown as maybe not a cinematic experience, but as kind of a Richard Linklater's boyhood of Mila Jovovich's career because you really can watch and this I don't know how to say this without sounding gross and perverted the way he films his wife changes

and it is fascinating the way the camera works in Resident Evil 1 and 2 versus again jumping ahead the monster hunter series right and there's a respect that I would say comes to it that I is fascinating okay so thank you for explaining Paul W.S.

Anderson.

Now something less appealing.

Yu-Bull.

This, I feel like, is the other side, right?

You can't have one without the other.

Who is Yubull?

What role does he play in this big thing?

Yubol, who's one of these guys who I don't know if anyone but him fully knows how to pronounce his name.

I believe he's German.

I don't know if it's like, like, I've heard

anyway.

He's this fascinating figure where he's he's like,

he's really prolific.

He's made so many movies and specifically so many video game adaptations.

And yet, consistently, his movies are not released by major studios.

Despite having actual like name actors in them, they don't make money.

And they are

reviled by critics and audiences.

It's fascinating.

If you look down, like, not to be like Rotten Tomatoes is the ultimate arbiter of like what is good or not, but it is, you know, it's a good way to just get a sense of how people reacted to a thing.

And U-Ball's movies have consistently single-digit Rotten Tomatoes scores.

We're talking House of the Dead, 3%.

Alone in the Dark, 1%.

Blood Rain, 4%.

Let's keep going.

Postal, 9%.

The best yet.

In the Name of the King, A Dungeon Siege Tale, 4%.

Far Cry

does not have a Rotten Tomatoes score.

That movie, I don't know if it really got a release because worldwide it grossed less than a million dollars.

But his movies truly seem like they're like money laundering schemes.

It's the kind of thing where I don't know exactly how he was able to keep making them in terms of like getting the rights to these games and getting these actors to sign on to them when consistently the movies are not making money.

Blood Rain makes $3.6 million

worldwide.

Alone in the Dark.

Okay, Alone of the Dark made $10 million.

Wow.

But it also cost $20.

So there you go.

I'm like,

I don't get it.

There's a Roger Corman nature, and maybe that's actually too kind to the way he shoots.

But for example, in 2011, he released four movies.

Three of them are Nazi movies.

One is called Blood Rain the Third Reich, which like, okay, I get what you're doing.

The next one is called Blubbarella, which

did you see Blubbarella?

No, but I do, I just simply recall when it came out.

Yes, according to Wikipedia, the plot is about an obese danther superhero set in German-occupied Europe.

And then he also made Auschwitz, the movie, that year.

The movie.

Fortunately, it doesn't actually have that colon.

It's just Auschwitz.

You hear that, three movies like that in one year, a variety of different types of genre.

That sure sounds like you're reusing sets and materials.

It does, you know?

And then obviously with Yubal, there's the legendary story of because this movie's got such bad reviews, when he challenged critics to fight him in a boxing ring, where the critics assumed this would be like a funny joke.

And then it turned out Yubal has actually like trained as a boxer for years.

And he beat the shit out of a bunch of movie critics, which is

weird and

like

both

morally questionable, funny as well.

He's just this really weird figure that I do think, I mean, not that there were necessarily a lot of like great video game adaptations happening at the time, but it really seems like it was like his mission to just tank the reputation of this type of movie by making so many of them and having them be movies that were just so

truly

hated.

Yeah, and he seemed to genuinely hate video games, which is interesting in your theory of the tanking.

On that, before we leave this era, some of these movies have since been reclaimed as camp.

Are there any from this period that you would actually recommend that you would put your stamp on?

I mean, okay, this is really where Paul W.S.

Anderson kicks off the Resident Evil franchise in 2002, which runs for many years.

And he, even if he doesn't direct everyone himself, he is the mastermind of the series.

He doesn't direct two and three, and I think writes them and then returns to make four and five.

And I think there's a sixth.

I've seen them all, but my memory of them is hazy.

They blur together.

But they're also, that's a weird one because the, you know, the Resident Evil games, at least like the initial ones, they're like survival horror games.

It's like you are a cop walking through a house and it's really dark and a zombie will pop out and it's scary.

And

it is interesting to me how Mortal Kombat is, I think, so faithful to like the spirit and look and narrative of the games.

And the Resident Evil games lean so much more into sci-fi action than horror.

And it really there kind of feels like as much as he puts a lot of the characters from the games in there and all of that.

It was really like, oh, this series is kind of a vehicle where I can just put in all of my own interests.

It becomes this very personal thing.

It stars his wife.

He just keeps doing it for years and like growing and experimenting like visually as a filmmaker and just doing a lot of stuff.

And that series, it just, it keeps making money for so long and really kind of of becomes the dominant video game movie franchise for the 2000s, I would say.

I'm going to hang a lantern on that one because we're going to come back to that at the very end of that series.

Yeah.

I will say also, in this era, Christoph Gonz's Silent Hill, I would say, is at this point now, even if it got like a mixed reception at the time,

probably considered artistically maybe the high point of this era.

It's It's adapting a more,

for lack of a better term, artistic horror game.

It's more atmospheric.

It's got some like really striking visuals in there.

If anyone's going to point to like any of these being worthwhile, like on an artistic level, Silent Hill, despite its 32% on Rotten Tomatoes, I think that's the one that people point to.

Like you said, Rotten Tomatoes is not the end-all-be-all.

Knowing the reputation of video game movies at this point too, if you go in and you see a movie that's actually doing something creative, it's so easy to mistake creativity for

bad.

The amount of trust that you have to have in something,

this is, I can't believe I'm saying this, but John Dielman.

You want to be in the right environment going into it so that you know it is in fact a good movie and you are ready to meet it on its page.

Where if you just handed somebody John Dielman after they watched, you know, I don't know, 30 YouTube videos that were all 10 hours long, right?

You might be in a space where you're like, I hate these things.

It's true.

It is funny.

And again, I'm sorry to keep bringing up Rotten Tomatoes scores, but I think that they're just worth mentioning.

No video game adaptation has a Rotten Tomatoes score even above 50% until 2018.

None of them have what even qualifies as a fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes until 2019.

So

even when these movies would

make money or whatever, I don't think there was any one of these that was like, to most audiences, viewed as a home run.

Let's take a quick break and then we will come back and we'll talk through the modern group of eras.

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Show starts in seven minutes.

We are back.

We have three eras left, but they're all of a piece, because I think this is when we start building towards this moment.

The next one I've got for you is the botched blockbuster era.

This is 2010 to 2016 and it's Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time, Need for Speed, Warcraft, and Assassin's Creed in 2016.

What the hell is going on here?

And how is this money getting pushed into video games?

I think this is a really smart grouping for this era that you've got here.

I think the major thing that happened here was at this point in time, comic book movies had kind of been,

you could say perfected in terms of like, they had, they had cracked that in terms of how to put A-list talent on these and make movies that like got Oscar nominations, that were giant blockbusters that got good reviews, that like were like critical and commercial successes, where it's like, we can take that and we know how to make that a thing that will make a ton of money, but also be respected.

We've had our Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy.

We've had, at this point in time, two Christopher Nolan Batman movies.

It's like, okay, this is now taken seriously.

It's time to now apply the same formula to video games.

It's the thing where it's like, I feel like everyone forgets that the Prince of Persia movie exists.

Disney made that movie as a major blockbuster.

Mike Newell, who had directed the fourth Harry Potter movie, directed it.

So it's like, okay, we got a guy.

He already did a huge franchise blockbuster.

We're putting major stars in there.

We got Jake Gyllenhaal.

We got Alfred Molina.

We got Ben Kingsley's in that movie, right?

Probably.

Yeah, he's got to be.

And yeah, it's okay.

This is, we've got a formula now.

We'll apply the formula that we've used, you know, comic book movies or like, you know, various

like literary adaptation, or, you know, like kind of like a YA literary adaptations, and it'll work.

They're now being taken seriously.

It's like, we don't need a B-list action director to do this.

We can get like an important British director who's made acclaimed movies.

To be clear, it doesn't happen every single time, but like Warcraft, you look at the trajectory that Duncan Jones was on, where it's like he has Moon, his like really cool, like lower budget, like a breakout sci-fi movie that's like gets him a lot of attention.

Then he goes and does source code, a like mid-budget studio movie that is well liked.

And it's like, okay, this guy is like leveling up each time.

And now this is what you do for your third movie.

This is where you go to a studio and you make a franchise movie.

You've now been like proved that you can be trusted with a big budget and visual effects.

And he's given Warcraft, a movie that Sam Raimi had been attached to for years before Duncan Jones signed on.

And like Justin Kurzl, who did Assassin's Creed, he had made the Macbeth with Michael Michael Fassbender that had also gotten a lot of attention, very, very stylish.

And this was like, okay, the whole team, even the cast that made Macbeth, they're going over and they're going to make this.

This was like, this is basically the era of we are making exciting choices and getting either really respected, skilled veteran directors, or we're getting really exciting younger talent who seem to have the chops to do it.

And

none of these movies really hit it's i i think it's like different issues each time you can't point to one thing that went wrong because it's warcraft is i think kind of an interesting movie it's really trying to tell like a a real like emotional story mostly about the orcs with really high-end like uh performance capture technology for all of these they're taking them seriously and they're also i think a key thing they're really trying to be faithful.

It was a thing that surprised me with the Assassin's Creed movie where I'm not, I'm, I'm not super experienced with that game franchise, but I had been a fan of the Prince of Persia games.

And I saw, okay, it's the same team making Assassin's Creed.

This looks like a lot of fun.

I remember when my roommate in college got the game, where you think, okay, right, yeah, it's like set in, I don't know, like the 1400s or whatever, and then you run around and you jump and climb things and you kill people, and the game begins.

And it's like, oh, actually, this is like set in the present.

And there's all of this exposition where you go into a machine.

And then your consciousness goes back in time.

And then you do stuff.

And I was like, who wants this?

Don't we just want to be the assassin running around back then?

And then so I was like, well, this seems stupid.

And so if they're making a movie, maybe they'll be smart and discard this

extraneous stuff that isn't interesting.

But But now it's this point where it's like, no, we're taking this seriously.

We're aiming it at the fans.

We're putting everything in there.

So is it, oh, the animus will be in.

Yes, the animus.

So, and it's the thing where it's like, it is faithful to the games to a fault, where they should have been a little bit more liberal with their adaptation.

And yet there's like, we got to include everything.

We want to recreate the things that the fans like.

Before we leave this era, because again, these three are bunched together.

They're all doing a version of the same thing.

But before we leave this one, can you tell listeners a little bit about the difference between the knowing versus the unknowing audience?

Because I think it's going to be relevant for the rest of the show.

Yeah, I mean, it is this thing where you have the knowing audience being the existing fan base who has played the games and they're coming in with expectations and they're going to

recognize the iconography, the...

They'll know the animus when they see it.

Exactly.

They'll know the animus.

But it is this thing where, and it's something that I feel like comic book adaptations perfected in terms of how do we put in the imagery and the stories and keep the characters intact that the knowing audience of the fans expect, but also

ease in the unknowing audience who just saw a trailer for what looked like a cool action movie.

And how do we make it work for both of them?

With any like big ip adaptation it is this balance you've got to strike and when you strike it correctly which i think this is what a big part of what led to the mcu's massive success they're like we can thread that needle and we can get the knowing audience really excited without confusing the unknowing audience who's coming in and they have no idea who like iron man isn't a matter of i think training the unknowing audience to become the knowing audience.

I've been a pretty big comic book reader my entire life.

You know, I've got a pull list at my local shop.

I go and pick up my books every week.

So I'm like that kind of person.

I'm much more of a comic book person than a video game person, actually.

And so I just remember how odd it felt in the past, especially like 15 years or so of watching this.

cultural change happen.

And I just remember like talking to like a friend who had never read a comic book in his life, but he was just like very into the MCU and him just saying, I read a rumor on Reddit that Adam Warlock is going to be in a movie.

And so now I've just, I haven't read any comics, but I've done all this research about Adam Warlock because I want to know all this stuff.

And realizing like, oh, wait, people are, the stuff that I thought

would turn people off is where people would be like, this is too dorky.

I don't want to know about that.

No, it turns out people really like doing homework.

Once they're hooked, they want to know everything.

They want, they don't want stuff to go over their heads.

They want to be up on this.

So then when those little references come in for the knowing audience, they can be a part of it.

And it's something that I think comic book movies just happen to pull off really well.

And also it does help that comic books are so serialized that, okay, there's like lots of these.

You can like, and it's most, when we say comic book movies, we mostly mean superhero movies, which is one genre.

And so there's like a commonality between all of these.

While these video game movies, it's, yeah, okay, so like Warcraft and Assassin's Creed don't really have anything in common.

The next era I have, I don't have a great name for it.

I'm calling it the profitable era or the passable era or the era of fine.

This is 2018 to 2022.

Begins in 2018 with Tomb Raider and Rampage.

And then we get Detective Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog 1, Werewolves Within, and Uncharted.

I'm so curious, what changed about video game movie adaptations between all the stuff we just talked about in these films, which are both critically okay

and financially fine?

That is a really good question.

Because, yeah, this is the point when finally video game movies achieve a passing Rotten Tomatoes score.

I'm so happy for them.

Which one is it?

Detective Pikachu is the first one that I believe Rotten Tomatoes cutoff point is 60% or higher is fresh.

And Detective Pikachu is the first one that does it.

That's nuts.

Yeah.

It is this funny thing where

I'm going to be honest with you, I have not seen the Prince of Persia movie.

So I cannot tell you what they did wrong other than maybe don't cast Jake Gyllenhal as

a titular Prince of Persia.

But that is not the reason the movie failed and was not well liked.

What does strike me about this era is that it feels like the previous era was aiming for a level of importance

that this era seemed to stop quite aiming for.

Assassin's Creed, obviously, very serious movie.

Warcraft, it wants to be like a Lord of the Rings.

It wants to be this massive fantasy epic.

And then Tomb Raider is mostly content to be like, we want to be like a pretty solid action movie.

It was released in March, not the height of the summer.

And, you know, Rampage, it's like, I don't know.

It's a Dwayne Johnson movie.

It's a movie where, you know, where big meets bigger.

It takes the game Rampage and then conforms it to like the rocks kind of like self-aware, like a, you know, guy in a gray shirt movie where I'm lovable and here's my animal friend and I know this is a little bit silly.

And then Detective Pikachu, like that, Detective Pikachu, I think, was like the really funny one where I just remember like film Twitter during the era that this was coming out when people are just like, oh my god, they shot it on film?

Oh my God.

And John Matheson, the guy who shot like Gladiator, is shooting it.

And it managed to strike this balance of like not taking itself too seriously.

It knows it's a movie where Pikachu wears a little hat, but also

they're putting the Pokemon on screen and it's the exact designs that everyone is familiar with, but just now with like some texture.

And so if you have any affinity for Pokemon from at any point in your life, you can't help but kind of perk up when you see like a Snorlax on the street and be like,

there it is.

And he looks like he should.

But then also, it's like better made than it needs to be.

And then you've got like Sonic the Hedgehog, which is like, sure, it's...

It's a movie where James Morrison hangs out with

a CGI talking animal and they like drive around or whatever.

It does not have super lofty goals.

It came out in February.

It's not trying to be a giant summer blockbuster.

I feel like it's its own conversation about the fan backlash to the original Sonic design and then straight up like spending millions of dollars to change the movie before it comes out to appeal to the fans.

That is its own thing, but like There you have Sonic, like looking and acting just like he does in the games.

So, so the fans can do the Leo point and be like, there it is.

There's the thing I recognized.

I'm getting my dopamine hits.

And also, even though it's not set in the world of the games, it's like Sonic leaves that world and comes to our world.

So there's enough familiarity to please the fans.

It's also a talking CGI character movie that kids inherently like, that even like kids unfamiliar with the Sonic games, they're just going to be drawn in by that.

And I think throughout these, you you have like interesting deployment of movie stars

where like

Detective Pikachu, it's like, it has Ryan Reynolds, who's like a big A-list movie star.

He's the voice of Pikachu, which is weird, but like you've got a movie star there.

Sonic the Hedgehog, you've got Jim Carrey doing the closest thing to a 90s Jim Carrey performance in like 20 years.

And he's there.

He's not the lead, but he's there.

The Rampage, you've got the rock.

And there is kind of this balance of like, the movies have more reasonable expectations.

They've got A-list movie star talent.

They're appealing to the knowing and the unknowing audience.

And yeah, again, I would not have thought to necessarily group this era as you have, but I think you're totally right.

This is, they cracked it where it's like, they're not making great movies, but they're making movies where fans and non-fans go see them and walk up being like, I had a pretty good time.

Before we go to the final era, any tweaks you would make to the eras.

How is your era projection look?

This really seems right to me.

It is one of these things where I'm looking at Uncharted, kind of being like, what do we, that is a weird one to me.

I think it does fit in this era.

It did well.

It didn't do incredibly well, but it did well.

But it's like, people like Tom Holland, and he's basically just playing Peter Parker again.

I feel like you have to have maybe two of a batch of things to make it work.

And that is either you have to have somebody making the movie who genuinely likes it.

And not in the Prince of Persia way where you've been paid enough millions of dollars that you're like, yeah, I love Prince of Persia and I just couldn't wait to make it.

You need Ben Schwartz doing the Sonic the Hedgehog campaign.

Or you need just an original idea that can use the IP as leverage, which I think is the werewolves within thing.

Obviously, that's a much smaller movie that most people aren't even aware is based on a video game.

Yes.

Or you need the biggest name in entertainment.

Yes.

And if you can get any of those while still respecting the fans, it seems like you can make your money back.

Which brings us to the final era, which is the actual blockbuster era, not to be confused with the botched blockbuster era.

The actual blockbuster era begins in 2022 to today.

And for me, this is Five Nights at Freddy's, Super Mario Bros.

the movie, Sonic 2 and 3, and Minecraft.

And

before we get into this era, and I'm very excited to do that, I would like you to tell me about the term palimpsestuous.

And your video, It's a quote of a quote.

I believe it was the scholar Michael Alexander who used the term originally.

And I believe technically, like the academic meaning of the term is when a manuscript has been partially erased and then overwritten.

So I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit more about that and this idea of adapting a video game being a weird act of erasing and writing over.

Yeah, it's, I mean, here I think we do have to, jumping off of the palibsuous idea, we do have to get into this the weird notion, I think, of adapting video games for screen,

or for cinema in any form, because you're inherently getting rid of arguably the primary component of the game, which is that it is an interactive experience.

And so

you're losing what is, I mean, just to be generous, like

at least half the experience of playing a game.

It's a game.

It's a game and you control it.

And now you're turning that into a different medium where you no longer are interacting with it at all.

You have no control over it.

You are simply watching it.

And so it's this question of like, okay, if you're removing the major component of the original material, what do you replace that with?

How do you make up for, like, how do you make this feel

in some way equivalent to or as enjoyable as the original when you simply cannot give the same thing?

I don't know if they've like really cracked the answer because it's like, obviously, Super Mario Brothers, the movie, is a major hit.

It is a giant blockbuster movie that makes a billion dollars.

There is more characterization and more story than you would usually get from a Mario game, with the exception of Super Mario RPG, which I know people are, the fans are going to get.

Thank you.

The darks have been appeased.

Of course.

But in general, it's like,

to me, the primary appeal of Mario games is like the game mechanics.

It is, you know, the platforming, the boss fights, the exploring these new worlds, and just the joy of being Mario and having really good tight controls and running around and jumping.

People don't play Mario games for the deep characterization and emotional journey that Mario Mario goes on in these games.

And so the movie, it attempts to like to,

I guess, to show examples of that platforming gameplay experience that people love from the games.

Where there's a point where, like, early on in the movie, it turns into like a side-scrolling thing.

You see him just like running down a street in Brooklyn, like jumping over things.

And there's a training montage where he learns to jump and hit blocks and stuff like that.

And again, it's like you're watching someone play a Mario game, but there's no way to fully recreate cinematically the experience of playing it yourself.

And so it adds a lot more story.

You know, it leans more into the Mario-Luigi relationship.

Princess Peach has more to do.

She's a girl boss now and has to like teach Mario stuff.

Donkey Kong is more fleshed out and they interact more.

And so here's the thing.

I personally am not a big fan of the Super Mario Brothers movie.

That said, it was a giant success.

It did so well.

It made so much money.

Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about because it did enough stuff that it made a lot of people happy.

That said, this is what I wonder about.

If you look at the movies from this era, the ones that are hits are the ones that are primarily aimed at younger audiences.

Borderlands, the R-rated Eli Roth film that has movie stars in it, like Jack Black is in Borderlands and Mario and Minecraft.

Jack Black has become the king of the modern video game movie, but he could not make Borderlands a hit.

And so I really think a big part of this is kids want to go to the movies too.

And if you can, if you can really hook the kids, that means you're really hooking like their parents as well.

You're selling a lot more tickets that way.

But it's that like the Sonic movies have done increasingly well with each one.

And as much as there are plenty of millennials who are like, I played Sonic a lot as a kid on my Sega Genesis, I'm going to go see the Sonic movie.

It's mostly kids and families.

Minecraft was like, obviously, there were all of the reports about how

it got memified and became this thing, became this like interactive experience where I, you know, like chicken jockey and all that stuff.

And like, again,

millennials saw the movie, but like teens and younger, I think, were making up so much of its box office.

Five Nights at Freddy's, it's like scary, but like scary in a way that kids can handle.

And so for that was like biggest with kids.

And then Mario, obviously, it's like, you know, everyone up to like age like, I don't know, 50 or 60 has a relationship with Mario, but also it's just a fast-paced, colorful,

like PG-rated movie.

And it was also the only kids movie like in theaters for like months so it just like ran the table there and so yeah this is what i'm really curious about in terms of video game movies going forward because obviously you look at the list of what is in development right now what's coming out soon there's so many

and

i think it remains to be seen if video game adaptations that are aimed at older audiences can really catch on and become a big thing, or if this is going to be primarily a realm of cinema that is aimed at younger audiences.

You talk about video game adaptations possibly being the realm of younger audiences.

And I think there's one way of reading that, which is, yeah, they're kids' movies, and kids' movies just make money, yada, yada.

But I wonder if there is something else going on here.

Because you mentioned Minecraft, and you mentioned Mario, and these are movies that are thin on plot, thin on what you would expect from a movie, but do feel like watching video games in a way.

And here's an audience that for the first time in history has en masse been trained to watch people play video games.

That's just part of their culture.

Do you think that there is an overlap here?

Are we seeing audience expectations, especially young, young people, change based off of what they're consuming outside of the movie theater?

I have no evidence for this, but I do think just, you know, the rise of Let's Play videos and Twitch streamers over the years and that just becoming like a major thing that people consume online surely must play some role.

Where when I say, oh, I don't want to watch a movie that feels like watching someone play a video game, that's just me personally.

And I do not watch Twitch streamers.

But for many other people, I think the idea of like watching a movie that feels like watching someone play a video game is totally fine.

That's okay.

And then there's just the fact that these movies are clearly very careful about aiming at the knowing audience.

Obviously, you know, you look at the way that Chicken Jockey became this thing where like they knew what they were doing.

They knew that we put that in there and there are enough people, especially younger people who are going to know exactly what that is, who will lose their minds because they're so excited to see that in a movie that, yeah, I think they cracked it.

I don't know if this makes for good cinema, but it certainly makes for profitable movies.

Like, really, the thing that I'm very curious about

is

when the inevitable sequels to Mario and Minecraft come out, how those will do.

Because I get why these ones were hits, because they were the first ones and they offered

kind of a new experience.

Like, here's the stuff that you love and are familiar with, but now it's in a new context.

It's on the big screen.

There's movie stars, or at least their voices.

But movie series that build as they go on and like grow the audience and become more financially successful, it's because there is some kind of ongoing narrative that audiences become invested in or characters that people really get into.

And I wonder

how much

people are going to be invested in the character of Mario and his ongoing story.

And so I'm wondering, like, will each movie keep topping the previous one?

Or will this be a diminishing returns thing where it's like the novelty is gone and there is really only so much you can do

with Mario on screen.

And that was kind of already accomplished by by the first movie.

I don't know.

I really don't know, but I'm just curious to see what happens.

Perfect, perfect.

Patrick, thank you so much for doing the show.

My pleasure.

Thanks for having me on.

Where can people find all of your amazing stuff?

Yeah, really, you can watch all the videos I make where I talk about movies, but more eloquently because I script them ahead of time on YouTube or Nebula.

The Patrick H.

Willems channels on either one.

If you Google Patrick H.

Willems, I will show up.

You now have 10 minutes to stock up on the tasty treats offered at our refreshment stand.

Up next on Post Games, Patreon subscribers, Patrick agreed to hang around and talk at length about the future of video game adaptations, of which there are over 40 in development.

We also talked about what it means when people say a movie feels like a video game, usually derisively.

Like I said, great conversation.

For everybody else, don't worry, there is still more show.

We have the news of the week.

So let's get to it.

Act 3, the news of the week.

One of the most anticipated video games ever has a release date.

Fans won't need to wait long to play Silksong, the sequel to Beloved Metroidmania Hollow Knight.

After nearly seven years of development, the game will be available on September 4th.

That is just two weeks away.

What took so long?

Well, that question which fans have been asking at every big video game event event for the better part of a decade, was never really aligned with the facts of making a video game at this scale.

The developer Team Cherry is a team of three people, and though other artists and creatives played a role in the game's creation, the bulk of the design, coding, and production fell on the trio.

In an interview with Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, Team Cherry co-founder Ari Gibson said,

It was never stuck or or anything.

It was always progressing.

It's just the case that we're a small team and games take a lot of time.

There wasn't any big controversial moment behind it.

It also doesn't hurt that Hollow Knight has now sold over 15 million copies, making the team exceptionally wealthy and extinguishing any financial heat to rush this follow-up to market.

Can Silk Song live up to seven years of feverish anticipation?

Can anything?

My tip, treat every game as its own object, free of hype and expectations, and you're much more likely to appreciate it for what it is rather than what it could be.

Elsewhere, President Trump's economic policies, including constant threats and rate fluctuations around trade embargoes, have begun to impact the cost of goods across the United States, including video games.

This week, week, Sony announced that the price of all PS5 models will increase by $50.

This follows price increase announcements by Xbox in May and Nintendo earlier this month, and the trend will likely continue.

Xbox and Asus have yet to reveal the price of their new handheld device, despite it being scheduled for release in October.

I suppose the cost of eggs doesn't seem so high when everything else is more expensive too.

Anyway, you need, no, you deserve some good news before we wrap.

So let me remind you of another big,

long anticipated sequel.

The last version of this game came out in 2013

and the new version is mere weeks away.

On September 10th, we get a sequel to the iconic racing game from 2013 that has nearly 5,000 reviews on Steam and is holding an average rating of very positive.

On September 10th, mere weeks from today,

we will all be playing Garfield Kart 2.

And pay attention, there'll be a test at the end.

And that is the news of the week.

And now, on with the show.

That is a wrap on video game movies.

Next week, flip adaptations on their head.

How a video game recreates cable TV.

My guest, writer, journalist, game designer, and literal rock star, Claire Evans, stops by post-games.

The lead singer of Yacht talks about her work on Lippo Plus, a game that channels Pee Wee's Playhouse, public access TV, and the forgotten full-motion video games of the 1990s.

It is a long rip of a conversation about how we make DIY art in 2025, why it is so hard to preserve the current stuff we love, and so, so, so much more.

But for now, I begin my farewell.

Postgame supporters get the show and the newsletter early on Fridays at 5 p.m.

Eastern.

They get extra acts and bonus materials.

This week, Patreon listeners got an extended conversation with guest Patrick Willems about the future of video game adaptations.

And each month, they get a video in my ongoing series video game journalism 101

except this month when you'll get something new and special and cool i'm making an audiobook version of the history of the street fighter movie you know staying on theme one last thing you might love about the patreon no ads on anything

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Post Games logo by James Barrum, theme by Mark Svarling, and a special thank you to this week's guest, Patrick H.

Willems.

And hey, if you like the show, please share it with a friend or leave a review.

It goes a long way to making this my full-time job for the indefinite future.

And that would be my Hollywood ending.

Anyway, thank you so much for listening.

I'll see you next week.