The Last of Us doesn’t need to break the video game movie “curse”

The best-known video game character of all time is Mario, the Italian plumber and superhuman messiah who has saved the Mushroom Kingdom countless times over. Naturally, when it became clear that this whole “video game” thing wasn’t going away, his story was one of the first Hollywood wanted to adapt.

The result was Super Mario Bros., a 1993 movie that takes a few cues from the games but is mostly just a bizarre action comedy that wouldn’t be remembered at all if it didn’t have a Mario-themed coat of paint slapped on it. Also Dennis Hopper is Bowser. It’s a famous catastrophe.

And that set the tone for video game adaptations for the next few decades. Street Fighter, Assassin’s Creed, Doom…all of them took their swing at crossover success, and all of them failed. And the less we say about the work of Uwe Boll, the director behind cinematic disasters like House of the Dead and Far Cry, the better.

Video game adaptations gained a reputation for being schlocky, lame cashgrabs devoid of passion, fidelity or much of a reason to exist. True, there were a couple of hits, like the first Mortal Kombat movie in 1995 or the first Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider movie in 2001. But they weren’t enough to reverse a trend. Mortal Kombat gained a cult following that persists to this day, but critics hated it and the sequel was so bad not even fans of the original can pretend to like it. It would take more than this for video game adaptations to be taken seriously.

It’s now 2023, a full 30 years after Super Mario Bros. HBO is readying The Last of Us, an adaptation of Naughty Dog’s video game series about the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. HBO generally isn’t in the business of making schlock, so expectations are that the show will be pretty good. Outlets like The Hollywood Reporter are acting like The Last of Us is the savior of the video game adaptation, which for years has amounted to, in its words, “billions of pixels of meh.”

The only issue with this line of thinking is that the video game adaptation “curse” has already been broken.

Good video game adaptations have been on the rise for years

The last few years have brought a wave of video game movies and TV shows that, while not universally adored by critics, have proven popular and beloved among fans. Even THR acknowledges “a few kid-targeted titles like [the] Sonic franchise” performing well, but it only brings them up to dismiss them.

But why should they be so quickly dismissed? Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Detective Pikachu all came out within the last four years, all of them are certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes (albeit by slim margins), and all of them cleaned up at the box office. This is a pattern of successful kid-friendly video game adaptations, and the best is probably yet to come:

And we don’t have to limit ourselves to adaptations targeted at kids. Netflix has been quietly producing a number of series based on video games that have gained passionate followings among teenagers and adults. I’m thinking of a show like Castlevania, which excels at opulent displays of animated ultra-violence.

More recently, Netflix has debuted Arcane and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, series based on the video games League of Legends and Cyberpunk 2077 respectively. Both of these shows have 100% fresh ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Both are praised for their visual flair, and critics single out Arcane in particular for its complex, involving story.

These are all unqualified successes, financially, critically and among fans. So whatever curse there was is gone. At the same time, there is something new that The Last of Us can bring to the table.

The Last of Us can be the first prestige video game adaptation

So video game adaptations have finally become successful. But are they respected? I’d say there’s a ways to go in that area. THR dismissed the Sonic movies as kids stuff, and while that’s unfair, it’s true that those films aren’t trying to be anything more than light diversions. Arcane and Edgerunners have higher ambitions, but for whatever reason it’s easier to people to write off a show or movie as unimportant when it’s animated.

What video games need, and what they haven’t gotten thus far, is a live-action, high-quality adaptation with bankable talent that upper echelon Hollywood types feel is worthy of award nominations. For video game adaptations to “make it,” they need the trappings of prestige, and no one does prestige like HBO.

The Last of Us is being produced by Neil Druckmann, who wrote the games; and Craig Mazin, the guy behind HBO’s Chernobyl, a drama about the 1986 nuclear disaster. The principal cast includes Game of Thrones veteran Bella Ramsey as Ellie and The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal as Joel. HBO is spending a mint on the first season to make sure it looks as spectacular as possible, and Mazin is saying all the right things about staying true to the games while still forging a unique path. He’s against filler, puts the characters first, and has no intention of dragging things out like AMC did with its zombie series The Walking Dead. And because HBO has a history of supporting its creatives, he may actually get to follow through on these promises.

So while The Last of Us won’t be the first good video game adaptation (or the second, or the third), I think it could be a turning point for how people think about the form. But even if that doesn’t happen, the die has been cast. Amazon is working on series based on Fallout and God of War. Paramount+ is heading into a second season of its Halo show. The Witcher is a hit on Netflix and Nintendo is joining the fray with a new Super Mario Bros. movie that’s pretty much guaranteed to be much better than the first one.

So video game adaptations are here and here to stay. The curse has long since been broken. But there are new kinds of magic to work.

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