I cover audience. I wrote about Christopher Nolan and directors whose names alone can open a movie, comedy’s quest for a Backrooms moment and aging stars clipping their way to social-media fame. Email me at matthew@theankler.com
In the ’50s, it was westerns. In the 2010s, it was superheroes. In the 2020s, Hollywood’s obsession — the thing every studio wants a piece of, the intellectual property everyone’s chasing — is video games
Around 25 years ago, Shawn Layden, a Sony interactive executive who would later run PlayStation,traveled to Los Angeles to pitch studios on a movie adaptation of a video game. He describes the critically acclaimed game, The Getaway, as “pretty much a Guy Ritchiefilm in an interactive format.” Studio execs dismissed the idea completely, citing the failure of 1993’s live-action Super Mario Bros.movie as proof that video game adaptations never work — what many used to refer to as a “curse.”
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“I realized it was going to take 15 years for a generation to move on from upper management in Hollywood,” Layden says, “and see the rise of executives in Hollywood who had actually played games.”
Now, Hollywood has made or is planning to make a film or TV show out of virtually every remaining gaming property. In just the past five years, studios have released adaptations of at least a dozen video games, including Minecraft, Arcane, Twisted Metal and Fallout — plus, in 2023, Apple’s Tetris, a Cold War thriller about the legal battle to license what would become the best-selling game ever. (It was actually pretty good.) The next five years will bring Street Fighter, aZach Cregger-directed Resident Evil reboot, Return to Silent Hill, a live-action Legend of Zelda, God of War, plus BioShock and Assassin’s Creed projects at Netflix and many more.
“So many games are being adapted that it feels like a new era has finally arrived,” says Mike Goldberg, co-founder of Story Kitchen, which has produced the Sonic the Hedgehogfranchise and other gaming titles. “Games are similar to when the comic-book adaptation exploded off of Iron Man in 2008.”
Video games have not yet been burdened with the can’t-lose designation superheroes carried through the 2010s — see 2024’s Borderlands, which cost over $110 million to make and grossed just $33 million globally. But hits like 2023’s animated Super Mario Bros. Movieand A Minecraft Movie, from 2025, have given credence to a superhero-esque sentiment: If the gaming audience is big enough, you pretty much have a preset hit on your hands.
And so Hollywood has commissioned everything from an A24 Death Stranding movie from the game’s legendary creator, Hideo Kojima, to Grow a Garden, based on a Roblox game about tending virtual plants that Goldberg and his fellow co-founder,Dmitri Johnson, have packaged as a film
Discounts on two or more seats
But not all gaming audiences are built the same, and Hollywood’s timing may be even worse than it looks in just the numbers. Last Monday, Xbox laid off a fifth of its workforce, cutting 3,200 jobs after its massive spending and streaming strategy misfired. But more crucially, younger audiences increasingly are also moving away from the kind of narrative, console-based games that have been the basis for almost every single adaptation up to this point, and toward lower-budget, lower-priced games for mobile devices and PCs.
It all raises the question: Is the video game IP boom the wave of the next decade — or a bubble waiting to pop?
Below, I break down:
- Why the games this generation actually plays are the ones with the least for Hollywood to work with
- How “black hole games” like Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox swallowed 40 percent of PC playtime — and starved the pipeline adaptations depend on
- Why more than half of the 50 best-selling gaming franchises of all time are already spoken for
- What the superhero slump reveals about the math of a shrinking IP pool
- What a $5.99 hide-and-seek game that sold 15 million copies in six weeks says about the next hit adaptations
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