Video Game Adaptations Are Getting Too Good for Their Own Good

ByBen LindberghNov. 13, 4:48 pm UTC
• 12 min

Grand Theft Auto VIhas Hollywood scared. It’s “tough to overstate the earthquake GTA VI is expected to create in terms of entertainment spending, distraction hours, and pop culture noise” when it launches on November 19, warns The Hollywood Reporter, in a new article entitled “GTA VIvs. Hollywood.” Geoff Keighley, gaming industry hype man, told THR that GTA VIwill be the biggest entertainment launch in history not only by revenue—a lock, given that the game is estimated to have grossed more than $1 billion in preorders alone—but in terms of “how much it will impact moviegoing, streaming, and the way people spend their time.” Hence the concern among studios whose upcoming movies or streaming series haven’t made like most non-GTA video games and gotten well out of the way.

Last year, consumer spending on video games rivaled at-home spending on movies and TV combined, so it’s true that Hollywood has something to fear from GTA and its less record-breaking brethren. But producers of scripted entertainment also have something to gain from games: good material. And Hollywood has learned how to turn a potentially adversarial relationship with video games into a symbiotic bond: If you can’t beat ’em, adapt ’em.

I’ve been covering video game adaptations for The Ringer for a decade, dating back to when Ubisoft bragged, “There’s going to be a ‘before and after Assassin’s Creed movie’ for sure.” This was technically true; the world didn’t end when that would-be blockbuster bombed. But neither did the so-called curse of video game adaptations. As I wrote in January 2017, “We’re still waiting for the first film that makes enough out of an actual license to satisfy fans and critics alike.”

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The wait eventually ended, and the stink associated with video game adaptations gradually dissipated. No longer are shows or movies based on games presumed to become “crime[s] against culture,” as I put it in 2014. So, after severalmoremissivesfromme about how game adaptations got good—plus a few frommycolleagues—why return to the topic?

Because, weirdly, it’s kind of come full circle. The old fear of flops and half-baked cash-ins is back, but for a very different reason: Game adaptations may have gotten too good for their own good.

“It’s one of the great catch-22s,” says Dmitri M. Johnson, cofounder of gaming-centric production company Story Kitchen. In 2011, long before Hollywood’s video game gold rush, Johnson cofounded his previous company, dj2 Entertainment, where he helped produce Sonic the Hedgehog. “As [one of] a handful of those preaching from the rooftops two decades ago that there was no such thing as a video game curse, just horrible adaptations and people who should not have ever touched it because they didn’t respect it, we obviously wanted to prove our thesis. And clearly that went well.”

So well, in fact, that there’s a new cause for concern. Johnson continues, “The catch-22 aspect is the nightmare of, if this becomes too good of a thing, do we start seeing the bottom-feeder producers who start chasing games having never played them, never going to play them. They just see a shiny object, and that’s where we start to see bad adaptations.”

Fretting about bad adaptations to come might seem like borrowing trouble, because 2026’s offerings have been heartening on the whole. This year’s slate of game adaptations brought box-office successes ranging from a YouTuber-backed sleeper hit centered on a little-known indie (Iron Lung) to another billion-dollar earner based on gaming’s best-known brand (The Super Mario Galaxy Movie) to a new entry in a long-panned film franchise that became the most critically acclaimed video game movie ever made (Resident Evil). And even prior to this year, the 2020s’ output had already put paid to the notion that there’s no such thing as a good game adaptation.

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It’s difficult to come up with a comprehensive list of video game adaptations, because somany projects fit that broad definition. Counting all mediums, genres, and regions, market research firm Ampere Analysis has tallied upward of 30 global game adaptations in three of the past four full years, most of which would be unfamiliar (and in some cases, inaccessible) to American audiences. After filtering and adding to one online compendium, I settled on a list of 160-plus movie and TV adaptations that would be a bit more recognizable. Then I broke them down by decade. The average IMDb user ratings tell a clear story: The 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s earned their reputation for benighted adaptations, but the 2020s have been a breakthrough period both in quantity and, crucially, in quality.

The average user rating of a 2020s game adaptation (6.52) has spiked by almost a full point relative to 1990s–2010s adaptations (5.61), an improvement of close to 20 percent—even as the pace of production has sped up so much that the 2020s have already reached a new high score for total projects produced, with three years to go. “It’s been fast,” Johnson says, adding, “It feels like it’s been 20 years, [but] the first Sonic came out during COVID. So we’re talking about five, six years of just, like, a lot of changes.”

One recent change we seem to be seeing speaks to the worry that this adaptation uptick could backfire. Suddenly, Hollywood seems to be buying in bulk. The past six months have produced several adaptation deals (or near-deals) in which multiple games, or whole libraries, have been packaged together:

• In June, production company The Arena announced its efforts to facilitate adaptations of several games made by Japanese developer and publisher SNK, including Fatal Fury, The Art of Fighting, Metal Slug, and Samurai Shodown.

• In July, Universal Pictures acquired adaptation rights to 10 vintage Atari games: Adventure,Asteroids,Berzerk, Breakout,Centipede, Crystal Castles,Millipede,Missile Command, Pong, andYars’ Revenge.

• In September, Netflix and Sega announced big-screen adaptations of Crazy Taxi and the forthcoming Stranger Than Heaven, plus a new Sonic animated kids’ series.

• In October, Chernin Entertainment won the bidding for film and TV rights to both of Embark Studios’ online shooters, ARC Raiders and The Finals.

• Later in October, Puckreported that nine-figure negotiations between Netflix and Xbox—which in August was said to be seeking to sell a studio or streamer on adapting a “pricey package of more than a dozen games” (such as Halo, World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls, and Diablo)—had fallen apart after the firing of Netflix content chief Bela Bajaria.

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“The trend seems to mirror the deals and acquisitions various streamers made years ago,” says Ronald Santa-Cruz, a former Sony Interactive Entertainment exec who now serves as Ampere’s games subject matter expert and authors its gaming-IP adaptation reports. Santa-Cruz likens these pacts to Netflix’s 2017 acquisition of comic-book publishing firm Millarworld and 2020 first-look deal with another comic-book publisher, Boom! Studios, which he says “were created for Netflix to gain rights for top IP or for IP owners to secure deals for their entire portfolios.” Of the recent gaming arrangements, “the Sega and Embark deals lean toward securing high-profile IP rights, while the Xbox, Atari, and SNK deals were likely IP owners aiming to sell their portfolios to establish a deal not only for top IP, but also lower-profile IP that might be difficult to sell as a standalone project.”

Santa-Cruz believes that Marvel’s success in converting comic-book IP into blockbuster movies may have inspired that earlier “library mining” at Netflix. Similarly, a string of smash adaptations since 2023 based on the likes of Sonic,Super Mario Bros., The Last of Us, Fallout, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Resident Evil may be spurring studios and streamers to snap up as much gaming IP as possible in search of the next sensation.

It’s been said that the strength of a first-person shooter rests on its shotgun, but the shotgun approach to adapting IP has obvious drawbacks. Netflix’s comics buys have yielded few completedprojects, and fewer hits. It took a combination of expertise and specificity to lift the “curse” that long afflicted game adaptations: The meta that emerged paired developers and publishers with scripted storytellers who had a deep familiarity with, and affinity for, a particular title or franchise. If Hollywood hoovers up properties indiscriminately, lured by the gaming gold in them thar hills, its hit rate might regress. “The minute you chase the trend, you are behind and you’re missing the point,” Johnson cautions.

Johnson says that at Story Kitchen, which has first-look deals for TV with Amazon MGM studios and for animated movies with DreamWorks Animation, he and his partners are “not trying to gobble up entire libraries, because not everything is going to be something that should be adapted in the first place, or adapted by us. So we still very much chase based on passion.” When companies fixate on “collecting a bundle,” he notes, “the strategies clash with creative integrity.” And, he adds, as the number of projects in the works skyrockets, “We have started seeing some adaptations that aren’t as strong as others. And I fear it’ll get worse.”

According to Ampere, the number of global game adaptations commissioned by year increased by an average rate of 10 percent annually from 2019 through the third quarter of 2026, with live-action adaptations growing by 27 percent. Ampere’s analysis suggests that as of the end of Q3 2026, 100 adaptations were in development, which almost matches the already inflated full-year totals from 2024 and 2025. And more have come to light in Q4, including adaptations of acclaimed games Cyberpunk 2077(at Paramount Pictures), PUBG (at Netflix), and Mouthwashing (at Sony Pictures).

With more deals to be done, additional deal makers have entered the market, joining stalwarts such as Story Kitchen and Roy Lee’s Vertigo Entertainment. The Arena originated last October and has been busyhiring; last month, talent management and production company Entertainment 360 teamed with venture capital firm Griffin Gaming Partners to launch HITpoint Entertainment, a company created to “source, develop, package, and produce adaptations across the full range of genres represented in gaming.” And Xbox just formed a new unit, XP, that includes a division called Xbox Pictures, which will work to set up the next adaptation tentpole à la A Minecraft Movie or Fallout.

In theory, inexperienced late adopters could be prone to making ill-advised bulk buys in bids to catch up with more judicious industry veterans. Like fantasy football drafters making panic picks amid a positional run, they might be reaching for the remaining options before all of the great games are off the board. But that rash of multigame deals might be more of a coincidence than a true trend. “We think this is the exception, not the rule,” says Johnson’s Story Kitchen cofounder Mike Goldberg, who notes that those deals were “announced similarly, but had different engines getting them going.”

For instance, Arena and SNK are natural partners because Arena is Saudi Arabia–backed and SNK is Saudi-owned; Arena was initially named Arena SNK Studios. Atari often lumps a lot of old games together into compilations whose wholes are greater than the sum of their parts; years ago, Goldberg and Johnson had pitched an “Atari cinematic universe” to the company because, Goldberg says, many old Atari games “have no creative, no story under them beyond the thumbnail of thumbnails.” Netflix had already produced an animated Sonic series, Sonic Prime, and Sega has been trying to make a Crazy Taxi movie for 25 years; after two early efforts fell flat, the game became part of a previous mass IP pitch in 2014. As for Xbox, the brand has been under intense pressure to be profitable (or even be bought out) as it executes a “reset” under new CEO Asha Sharma. When Netflix’s shakeup scuttled Microsoft’s hopes of an adaptation windfall, the latter company pivoted. Per Puck, Xbox is now“pursuing smaller deals with more partners,” and the gaming giant toldKotaku, “our priority is the right creative partner and release model for every franchise and project.”

The caliber of creative partners involved in video game adaptations has come a long way since the dark days of Uwe Boll. In the wake of Cregger’s triumph with Resident Evil, name-brand directors and writers are attached to several other video game movies—Helldivers(Justin Lin), Elden Ring (Alex Garland), Call of Duty(Taylor Sheridan),Battlefield (Christopher McQuarrie)—and TV shows: Tomb Raider (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Far Cry (Noah Hawley), God of War(Ronald D. Moore), PUBG (Donald Glover). Goldberg mentions another Hollywood darling: “There’s an obsession, pun intended, with going after internet-native genre IP.” Gaming IP is positioned to capitalize: Obsession director Curry Barker is open to making a video game movie, and Backrooms director Kane Parsons might already be adapting Portal.

On the other side of December’s The Angry Birds Movie 3, 2027 is shaping up to be the biggest year yet for game adaptations, with heavy hitters heading for the multiplex (Sonic 4 in March, The Legend of Zelda in April, A Minecraft Movie Squared in July) and new seasons of The Last of Usand Fallout coming to the small screen, likely along with the TV premieres of God of War, Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed,and Far Cry. Elden Ring, Helldivers, and Call of Dutyfilms will follow in 2028, and we can count on more Mario, Mortal Kombat, and Five Nights at Freddy’s before long. 

Battlefield, BioShock,Bloodborne,Clair Obscur, DeathStranding,Gears of War, Ghost of Tsushima,Horizon,Metal Gear Solid, Split Fiction …it’s hard to think of many major games that haven’t had adaptations teased. In January, Ampere identifiedBaldur’s Gate as the ripest IP for the picking; exactly one month later, HBO pounced. Some adaptations could even outlive their sources: The Mass Effectgame series may be moribund after Electronic Arts closed storied studio BioWare last month, but a Mass Effect TV series remains in development at Prime Video.

I mentioned that the average IMDb rating for video game adaptations in the 2020s has been just a smidge above 6.5. Well, the average rating for allprojects on IMDb is roughly 6.6. In other words, video game adaptations, which once were remarkably bad across the board, are now like any other kind of content: highly variable. Case in point: The user ratings for this year’s releases run the gamut from strong (Resident Evil) to solid (Among Us, Golden Axe) to decent (Mortal Kombat II, Street Fighter, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie) to subpar (Iron Lung) to terrible (Return to Silent Hill). “I do think game [adaptations] are approaching a point where it should be too big to fail, meaning there’s been enough good ones to know that it is execution dependent,” Johnson says. “And not dismissed again as, ‘Oh, nope, games don’t work.’”

In fact, there may not be much reason to cover video game adaptations as a monolithic phenomenon anymore, now that they’re pervasive, varied, and as good (or bad) as anything else. “People often like to group us with superhero movies,” Johnson says. “That’s not a correct one-to-one. Superhero movies are exactly what it sounds like. We are closer to interactive manuscripts, like books.” And, like books, games can accommodate any type of tale—as indicated by Story Kitchen’s catalog, which encompasses co-op action, Robloxhits,horrorgames, bloodybrawlers, and narrative–drivenadventures. Lately, the company has been focusing on Sonic, Lara Croft, and Max Caulfield. “We wore so many genre hats this summer,” Johnson says. “And the only thing they had in common is, they were games.”

For both better and worse, there are more of those than ever, which means more grist for the adaptation mill. In terms of yearly releases, Goldberg says, “It’s like we went from enough games to fill like a bookshelf to a Barnes & Noble. … And then beyond that, Hollywood has stopped being obnoxious about working hand in hand.”

That guarantees that TV shows and movies will get made. It doesn’t guarantee they’ll be good.

“If you look at Hollywood history, you’re going to get schlock,” Johnson says. “It’s going to happen, it’s inevitable. But then you’re going to get some really great stuff. I don’t think game adaptations are any different. We’re going to get incredible things that people are going to be shocked it’s based on a game. And then we’re going to get stuff that’s going to fit into the stereotype of, ‘Of course it’s based on a game.’ As long as that’s established and not everything is expected to be a banger, billion-dollar franchise, then I think the sky’s the limit.”

Or maybe the limits lie in Liberty/Vice City. There’s been no buzz about a Grand Theft Auto adaptation, but not because Hollywood hasn’t hunted the biggest game. Shortly after GTA IIIcame out in 2001, Rockstar Games reportedly passed on a $5 million payout for a movie adaptation that would have been directed by Tony Scott and starred Eminem. The studio has continued to decline all entreaties since. “We don’t rule it out, but we’re very, very selective,” Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Rockstar corporate parent Take-Two Interactive, said this week. When a game can be a billion-dollar banger before it debuts, it needs no movie magic. No wonder Hollywood is worried. Even in the era of rampant adaptations, GTAis too big to nail.

Ben Lindbergh
Ben LindberghBen is a writer, podcaster, and editor who covers culture and sports. He hosts ‘Effectively Wild’ at FanGraphs and previously wrote for FiveThirtyEight and Grantland, served as editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, and authored ‘The MVP Machine’ and ‘The Only Rule Is It Has to Work.’