Video Game Movies Suck - Television Tropes & Idioms

After watching this, in mounting aghastment, I've now realized why it's so bad. It's because it's good. Unfortunately, what it's good at is being a movie of a computer game. If you've played your way through the TR games you'll realize that. The atmosphere of the locations, the way Lara runs and fires, the traps ... someone sat through all the games, taking notes. It's truer to the feel of the games than most novel-based movies are to the original novel. Time and care was spent on that. Then, since the games have no characterization, or any plot much above the level of "get all the bits", they pasted together an inconsistent load of old garbage in twenty minutes and hoped the SFX would carry it. They don't.

Terry Pratchett

, on the Tomb Raider movie.

For whatever reason, video games and movies don't play well together. Every so often, someone with dollar signs in their eyes will try to make a movie based on a video game franchise, only to run into this unscalable wall: Video Game Movies Suck.

It's kind of hard to say why. Some would say that video games are essentially just movies that have showmanship sacrificed in favor of control, so sacrificing the control leaves you with a bad movie. Others would say that video game plots are just bad, existing just to give the player an excuse to go out and fight things.

The reality? Well, it tends to vary — Platformers tend to not have enough plot within the games themselves (maybe a three-paragraph setup in the manual and a two-minute ending), so the writers need to improvise, resulting in either Adaptation Decay or Adaptation Distillation — and so far, it's usually the former. Fighting Games tend to have a different, but flimsy plot and endings depending on the player's character, and the writers have to mishmash these various plot threads into a coherent whole. The only video game genre that pays much attention to plot — RPGs — tend to have far too much plot to squeeze into a two-hour flick without leaving a ton out.

Add to that the facts that too many plot changes risk alienating the carryover demographic, and that what plot less cerebral games do have tends to be on the level of, well, to quote the Doom comic:

"DYNAMITE! I'm cooking with gas! I've gotta handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah, that's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man! I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!"

So far, no one's nominating video game movies for Oscars. If you hear new, exciting rumors about an upcoming film (like the rumored John Woo-directed Metroid movie), tread carefully, or you may be crushed beneath the Descending Ceiling of bad writing.

Sometimes the reverse is true, of course, which is The Problem With Licensed Games.

For some reason, Dating Sim movies seem exempt from this trope, although with anything, there are exceptions.

Note that all these entries are pretty subjective. If you object to one, you should probably mention it on the discussion page.

Flat-out bad:

The Tomb Raider movies. Angelina Jolie vehicles. First one was bad. Second one was worse. Jolie wore big chest padding in the series... yes, you heard that right, Angelina Jolie's breasts weren't big enough for this movie. Thanks for making video games look mature, guys.
- Sorry. Your Mileage May Vary here when it comes to the first one. Second one was bad, granted.
Wing Commander: Frankly, it's probably best you not think about this one at all. It ignored virtually everything about the popular video games except the most basic concepts, even changing the Kilrathi from feline humanoids into some sort of strange lizard creatures, with truly bad rubber masks, and added a ton of weird metaphysical junk never seen in the games to make the hero into some sort of piloting Ubermensch. Also, sonar in space.
- On the other hand, Maniac was as much an asshat in the movie as in the game. So it was true to one thing. Inevitably, one of the things everyone hates. Go figure.
- Strangely enough, Wing Commander III, IV and to a lesser extent, Prophesy were all notable games in that they depended on actors in full motion video sequences to move the plot along. Many fans argue that the games have more well-known and better quality actors (Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell, Ginger Lynn) than whom got signed up to do the "big budget" movie.
  - Anyone find it odd that the 'Wing Commander' starring Mark Hamill ISN'T a big fat 'Star Wars' ripoff, while the one WITHOUT him is?
  - According to at least one interview, the Kilrathi costumes were actually accurately designed, and truly menacing in appearance — but due to the sets' low ceilings, the costumes could not stand at full height.
- Even more bizarrely, the movie was co-written and directed by Chris Roberts, who was the Lead Designer of the games.
  - Proving that even if you had the creator of the game making a video game movie it won't be an instant success.
A lot of anime OVAs based on fighting games tend to land on the "bad" end of the scale, partially because the plot to most fighting games is pretty thin to begin with, making it hard to write a decent script. (A major example: Tekken: The Motion Picture, which is actually an OVA)
- There were other good ones like Night Warriors: The Animated Series (not to be confused with the American Darkstalkers animated series, which did suck).
Everything and anything Uwe Boll has turned his hand to from House of the Dead (which shares one character name with its source, used clips from the games and featured no houses at all) onward. A running joke in the industry is that you've made it when Uwe Boll asks to make a movie of your game. Hideo Kojima refuses to speak to him. For any reason at all.
- Uwe Boll is particularly noteworthy — and reviled — because many gamers believe that the games he adapted could've made good movies if they'd been handled by the right people, rather than someone, who, despite his denials, seems to be out to make tax breaks for rich Germans rather than watchable films.
- One of Boll's more recent projects is Postal, a Dead Baby Comedy based on the darkly humorous shoot-em-up from Running With Scissors. From what this editor has heard, the film takes Refuge In Audacity just so it can Anviliciously snipe at the War on Terror and just about everything else that's wrong with 21st century America, as well as the hordes of angry video game nerds who despise Uwe Boll's existence. But since a few people seem to be entertained by the film, and not just in a So Bad Its Good way (it even won "Best of Festival" at the 2008 Hoboken Film Festival), Postal may be Boll's best film yet... which isn't saying much.
- This troper (and at least one other person) find House of the Dead to be a comic masterpiece rather than merely awful.
- This troper is of the opinion that Uwe Boll is getting better at filmmaking as time goes by, and this makes his films MUCH less watchable, thanks to smoothing over everything that made his movies horribly hilarious and leaving nothing but boring mediocrity behind.
- In the Dungeon Siege movie, the nameless farmer main character was actually named "Farmer", he had a Precision Guided Boomerang, and the movie looked a little too much like Lord Of The Rings. But he said it's nothing like Lord Of The Rings because, and get this, the movie isn't about a ring so it's okay. But he gains points for having the movie just as non-interactive as the original game.
- Funnily enough, this trope is starting to work backwards for Boll, with the movie (and game) 1968 Tunnel Rats.
Double Dragon: Moved to a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles for no apparent reason, replaced the Big Bad with a Corrupt Corporate Executive, and generally kept nothing of the games' plot except "Brothers who use martial arts and wear red and blue". Alyssa Milano's arse in denim short-shorts makes a sterling effort to save this film, yet still fails.
- There are a few good things in the film, once you get past the jokey tone and ridiculous plot. Robert Patrick chews the scenery with gusto as the villain and gets all the best lines. Martial artist Marc Dacascos does his best in the action scenes. And of course, the aforementioned part of Alyssa Milano's anatomy. The dead weight in the film is definitely Scott Wolf, who can't act, fight, or evoke any emotion in the audience outside of annoyance.
  - No wonder they had Billy Lee (played by Scott Wolf) turned from just about as skilled in fighting as his brother into a wimp who is more into the brains than brawns.
Devil May Cry: an anime series rather than a movie, but easygoing wiseguy Dante has apparently been replaced by Alucard from Hellsing wearing a silver wig, who prefers using his guns over his sword. This, despite the fact that one of the writers who worked on the show also worked on several of the games.
Maple Story is another example, take away the classes and heroes that made Maple Story the game it is and replace it with a beginner class brat whom runs around with a rock to train with a lousy wooden sword. A Half Human Hybrid magician and several furries joining them in an adventure with little relation to the mainline plot? Well we got ourselves one of the crappiest animes known to man. And to think they were going to do a parody version similar to 8-Bit Theater.
The upcoming movies based on Tekken and King of Fighters. One look at those and it's incredibly obvious that no one working on them really knows or cares anything about the source material, and it feels almost as though they're trying to piss fans off. These haven't even been released yet and can already be accurately summed up as generic, weird, overly dark, low-budget martial arts films with popular names slapped on in the hopes of making more money.
- And King of Fighters looks to be shaping up to be complete suck. Just wait until you see the picture of Ray "Darth Maul" Park as Rugal...looking absolutely nothing like the videogame version of Rugal.
Although this one was thankfully cancelled, it still definitely belongs here. A few years ago, a Soul Calibur movie was in the works, but it had ABSOLUTELY NO CHARACTERS OR SETTINGS OR PLOT POINTS FROM THE GAMES, and the holy spirit sword Soul Calibur was to be portrayed as the evil blade instead of the demonic Soul Edge. Perhaps the production's cancellation in 2007 was the result of someone finally looking at their horrible attempt at a game-to-movie adaptation and realizing, "Wow, this really does suck".

Partial Exceptions / So Bad Its Good:

Mortal Kombat. Sonya is a Faux Action Girl. Sub-Zero and Scorpion are mindless slaves of Shang Tsung. Kitana is a Distressed Damsel. And the movie ends on a cliffhanger. On the other hand, there was plenty of combat (much of it very well-choreographed), and much mortality. The plot, while not exactly Shakespeare, was serviceable and didn't get in the way of the action. Some feel Raiden's role as The Obi Wan makes more sense for a Physical God than the not-quite-first-string fighter he was in the games. And the movie ends on a cliffhanger! However, the sequel, the Animated Adaptation (just watch this montage and try to prove us wrong), and the Recycled The Series all fall squarely under the trope.
- Considering the videogame was "Enter the Dragon with superpowers" they had more to rip off than most.
- The soundtrack was pretty awesome too.
- Gene Siskel actually gave Mortal Kombat a (marginal) thumbs up.
Doom: On the one hand, the plot didn't make much sense, the "science" made even less, and the violence was silly and gratuitous. On the other hand, some would argue that that's exactly what a Doom movie should be like. The really good music probably saved the film. Thumbs-down for inexplicably changing the monsters from Demonic Invaders to genetic experiments, though. To be fair, this seems to be an irresistible pull for Derivative Works; the Novelization of the games deviated from the demonic nature of the monsters, as well.
- There's also the excellent subversion of The hero succumbing to The Virus and becoming the Big Bad.
- Actually one of the most frequently issued complains about the movie (besides the You Fail Biology Forever part) is that there is not enough senseless violence reminiscent of the original Doom and too much Stock Scares in Dark Tunnels reminiscent of Doom 3 instead.
Pokemon. Being based on the Anime adaptation instead of directly deriving material from the games themselves helped the movie series avoid the pitfalls of needing to compress an entire game's worth of plot. Often considered the more watchable half of the anime series by some, despite being used as a vehicle to promote new Pokemon characters to be featured in upcoming game sequels. Of course, the targeted audience for this movie would skew much younger compared to all the other movies here, and not to mention they still get released in theaters in Japan.
- For its target demographic (younger kids who play Pokemon), the movies generally go in the "genuinely good" section. For many, they'd fit here.
  - With the exception of the 4Kids dub of the first movie, which was just wrong! Heck, they took what was a reasonably good base plot (Mewtwo is an emotionally-suppressed character that considers himself a separate type of entity to others, but still has sympathy for them but prefers to hide it) and completely BARF'D all over it (Mewtwo's just evil, no motive at all)!
- The movies do have a break now and then when they aren't so bad they're good. Destiny Deoxys and The Rise of Darkrai are quite good in some people's opinion. The last in the trilogy looks to be quite well, as well.
The Resident Evil movie was considered a great success. A lot of the credit can go to the fact that it wasn't adapted from the plot of the game; the writers took the premise and wrote another, more movie-friendly story to go with it. And Milla Jovovich. And Sienna Guillory in the sequel. Oh, my.
- This troper thought the best part of the movie was watching "Alice" (Jovovich) go from amnesiac infant to Bad Ass Action Girl; he thought she did a pretty good job. (As such, the sequels were letdowns.)
- This troper will agree that the first movie had its merits, the later two movies where just good examples of They Just Didnt Care. As they turned what was originally suppose to be a horror movie, into a generic Aeon Flux Hollywood action girl movie clone. What makes matters worse is that the DVD behind the scenes bonus in the second movie, admits this. Complete with the actresses smiling while saying it.
The Silent Hill film was also a success, visually beautiful and very fitting within the theme of the series, although it actually paid closer heed to the original game and used some members of the games' production teams. Whether or not it was as scary as the games, and whether the inclusion of Pyramid Head was a good thing, is still hotly contested. Note that Silent Hill, like Resident Evil, is in the Survival Horror genre, which is already pretty close in nature to the horror genre of films.
- Then again, Your Mileage May Vary especially concerning the replacement of Harry with Rose, because the creators didn't think audiences could relate to a single father looking for his daughter. It had to be a woman because only women can care about their children.
  - This troper and most of the friends he saw the movie with related a lot more to Sean Bean, since he searched just as desperately for his wife and daughter, yet was doomed to failure from the start, since he couldn't get inside the "other" Silent Hill where they were trapped.
  - It struck me that Sean Bean's character never asked for his daughter, only his wife. It was like he just didn't care that his daughter was missing, and I think that was what they were going for.
  - Didn't you read the above the director seems to think men don't care about their kids.
  - Despite this insulting ascertainment by the director and screenplay writer, and the whole people getting ripped apart thing at the end, which was never part of the real silent hill games, it is still considered by many to be the best adaptation of a game to date, a serious film to compare with the fun and campy Mortal Kombat.
  - The movie takes many elements (characters, events, symbols) from the game and completely twists them to the point that they have a completely different meaning/purpose, or none at all. This results in Silent Hill being the most accurate game-to-movie adaption to date and still completely lacking the essence of the original.
- The script was sent to Konami for approval and was sent back with a note "Why there are no men?". Sean Bean's part was added and after that, the script was approved.
The Hitman movie has a plot which will make less sense the more you think about it, but it will keep you entertained for 90 minutes.
- This troper agrees, although it seem like they entered "Action movie in Russia" into a scriptwriting machine and shot the result.
- That, and it at least tries to maintain 47's characterization as The Chessmaster, rather than make him a generic action thug.
  - This troper begs to disagree. The games give you ratings on how well you do your assassinations, with the best ranking given to those who execute their objectives exceptionally well (as in no one spots you, no innocents get harmed, minimal to no use of your weapons, kills look like accidents) while the film shows assassinations to be very bullet-and-sword-laden affairs.
- Actually, this troper read the near-final script and the movie would be even better if not for Executive Meddling. The differences between script and movie being: 47 being hunted by Spetsnaz instead of other "agents", the whole affair being a Xanatos Gambit played by the KGB agent, a couple of action scenes more and no recycled footage from completely different TV series. And yes, 47 is even more of a Chessmaster in the script.
Ahem...The Wizard. It's not even based on any video game (though it has very blatantly obvious Product Placement), but somehow manages to be watchable through almost ninety straight minutes of cheese.
Max Payne: The story and characters are totally stock and bares only a passing resemblance to the source material (the biggest complaint is the decision to excise the overly gritty, intentionally So Bad Its Good Purple Prose narration from all but the beginning), but it doesn't completely fail (it's already financially successful). The film is a standard revenge shoot em up, and Max isn't exactly that likable of a lead to begin with (although he had a lot more personality in the games), but several sequences are visual stand outs. Your Mileage May Vary of course.
- Basically, ignore the story and skip the first half-hour of the movie. Once the sky sets itself on fire the movie gets a lot more watchable.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Represents a great leap forward in technical terms, but it ends up living smack-dab in the middle of the Uncanny Valley as a result. No real relation to the games at all, except for a guy named Cid (And even then, they spelled it "Sid"), the names of the planets, and monsters that disappear into the aether when you kill them (plus, very loosely, the metaphysics of Final Fantasy VII). All of this is topped off with a Cliche Storm plot joined In Medias Res and a Gainax Ending. Probably single-handedly responsible for ending Square's existence as an independent company, as they lost so much money from it that they were forced to merge with Enix. Still, it's very much a case of Your Mileage May Vary; Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars, and he was far from alone in appreciating the film, but many others weren't so kind.
- In a way, being a 'great leap forward in technical terms', only having vague and coincidental relationships with the other games, and being full of cliches makes it the perfect movie for Final Fantasy, at least the Play Station era onwards.
- The Spirits Within is perhaps best watched as a standalone movie in its own right without comparing it to any of the Final Fantasy games.
  - This troper agrees as she actually enjoyed SW because she didn't think of it as having anything to do with the games. Contrast this to Advent Children which TRIED to have a plot based on the games but ended up failing pretty epically in this troper's opinion. It was just a fanservice movie that made very little sense which isn't to say I didn't watch it a couple times...But I wouldn't buy it or the new Complete Collection version.
Night Trap: The Movie showcased this trope in an unexpected way, taking a cult-classic "interactive movie" and removing the interactivity, leaving all the delicious So Bad Its Good camp intact.
The Prince Of Persia movie is shaping up to be at least decent if not genuinely good. First, Jordan Mechner (the game's author) is responsible for the main plot and the rest of screenwriters focused more on pacing and embellishments. Second, it's produced by Universal, which means it'll fare better that any schlock Fox was throwing at us through the last two years. Third point, which may be debatable, is the fact that movie apparently goes the Silent Hill way, taking a lot of things from the game, but putting them in a different context, which means that Your Mileage May Vary. Anyway, have a scoopful.

Full exceptions / genuinely good movies:

The Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie was very accurate, putting all the characters in the right place, and with the right personalities. The animation is excellent, and ki attacks have never looked better. The character designs were excellent, and Bison's design was improved, giving him a huge muscular look that Capcom has used ever since. The storyline of the movie was brought over to Alpha simply replacing Ken with Ryu during the brainwashing scene, and replacing Guile with Charlie. The iconic grass scene is a stage in Alpha 2, and several other things were taken from the movie are shown in Alpha, such as Ken having long hair when he was younger and gave his bandana to Ryu. Did I forget to mention a nude Chun-Li scene and that she kicks Vega's ass in a REALLY well-done fighting scene?
Then there was Wing Commander Academy, an animated series which was quite loyal to the games, including the ship designs and voice actors for Blair, Maniac and Tolwyn.
The two Fatal Fury anime specials, Legend of the Hungry Wolf and The New Battle, were pragmatic adaptations of their corresponding games, focusing around the game's main characters Terry, Andy, Joe, and Mai, with most of the other characters being adapted into supporting roles or cameos. They took some creative liberties, such as the addition of Terry's doomed love interest Lily McGuire and Wolfgang Krauser's younger appearance, but nothing that completely deviated from the source material. The movie itself, appropriately titled Motion Picture, has an original storyline that's pretty decent and can be enjoyed independently without much knowledge of the games.
While not necessarily perfect, the animated movie adaptation of Animal Crossing (released only in Japan) does a far better job maintaining the spirit of the material than one would think possible and is a pretty decent watch to boot, if a little simple in its plot.

Contested:

The Dead Or Alive movie has widely divergent opinions. The game is a cheesy fighter, focused around a not-quite believable conspiracy theory to build the ultimate fighter that's really just an excuse to show off cool moves and hot women. The movie, on the same hand, is a cheesy fight-flick, focused around a not-quite believable conspiracy theory to build the ultimate fighter that's really just an excuse to show off hot women and cool moves. The fight scenes were well done and managed to encorporate some of the cooler moves without being obvious about it and some of Kevin Nash's scenes with Jaime Pressly were hilarious.
It's fair to say that Resident Evil: Degeneration belongs here. Bonus points for having more in common with the source material than just the title and some zombies (not having Milla Jovovich swoop in and hijack the plot certainly helps), but coming from someone who likes the film: the script definitely needed a little polishing up in the English dub, since things that sound really deep and cool in Japanese don't always translate very well into other languages.
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is either loved or hated, depending on who you ask. It, too, wasn't a straight adaptation, actually being a sequel to the game.
- However, this might vary depending on whether the person you ask has seen the English version or the Japanese subbed version. This troper discovered the difference when he couldn't even have a conversation about the movie with someone who had seen the other version.
  - I would think most people would either watch just the Japanese, or watch both.
- Opinion may also vary depending whether one considers it as a full-scale movie or as "non-interactive software" (a term Nomura encouraged).
Street Fighter. Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle. A film that couldn't decide if it was a comedy or an action movie. Bison has a god complex, but then goes around making Bison dollars (though it is pretty well agreed that Raul Julia's manic Ham And Cheese is pure win). Ken and Ryu are money-grubbing con-artists. Dee Jay and Zangief are bad guys (although the latter does a Heel Face Turn). Balrog is a good guy, E. Honda is Hawaiian, and they are part of Chun Li's news team. T. Hawk and Cammy work for the A.N (the last was excusable). Guile is an American commander with a Belgian. His friend Charlie gets transformed into Blanka thanks to M. Bison forcing Dhalsim (who looks entirely different) to work for him (although, to be fair, this was accepted as fact by fans until the Street Fighter Alpha series said otherwise), and there are almost no flashy moves, just a Hadoken at point blank range and Bison's various Psycho powers. Whether or not it manages to be So Bad Its Good or not depends on the individual viewer.
- Hong Kong also filmed a Street Fighter movie, although it was more of an Affectionate Parody. I remember a scene where in one fight against Chun Li, the best way to defeat her? Solve her Athelete's foot problem.
- Although it mostly retained the cast of characters from the game, Akuma was left out and Fei Long was replaced with a Jonas Quinn named Sawada.
  - Speaking of Street Fighter, the recent The Legend of Chun-Li is considered one of the worst game movies of all time, and the first Street Fighter movie (and maybe some Uwe Boll movies) are apparently better than it. For a time being, it had a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not to mention that Ryu is just barely in the movie (and as a mention) and almost everyone other than five people are left out entirely.
It's hard to say whether 2000's SiN: The Movie, based off the 1998 FPS video game of the same name, is good or bad. It's a reimagining of the original game's storyline, with police captain John Blade pursuing a dangerous biochemist/scientist named Elexis Sinclaire, who wants to destroy mankind with bioengineered mutated monsters. It has many of the same characters as the video game, has a sizable amount of violence (in copious detail), and actually works quite well for the first half. However, the film has J.C., the hacker/prominent supporting character from the video game, killed off in the first five minutes, and replaced by his sister, who has all the same skills as him. The last half of the movie is one long fight sequence as Blade and J.C.'s sister (who is also nicknamed J.C.) running up through the levels of the SinTEK building killing anything that moves. There isn't really an ending, and the film is only an hour long. Not only that, but the English and Japanese voice tracks for the film have different dialog, making their plots slightly different.
- Given the fact that none of the major monsters in the movie ever have an occasion where they simply fail to move, fight, or do anything while being blasted to death, one could quite well argue that the movie surpassed the original game for once.
The Salamander OVA is not bad on its own, though it's very light on the action side.
The Super Mario Bros Movie might be the single most boneheaded film adaptation of anything. It isn't just like the writers could never have played the game; it's more like they did play it but were experimenting with mind-altering substances at the time. Where to begin? Instead of the cheery Mushroom Kingdom, the film takes place in a dreary rain-soaked Cyberpunk-type environment. Instead of a dragon-turtle thing who has captured the Princess, Bowser is a humanoid tyrannosaurus mob boss from an alternate dimension. Goombas are pinhead thugs stuffed into suits, Mario is married, Yoshi is a foot-high velociraptor, Toad is an unquestionably male anti-establishment rock star, and Princess Daisy is an Action Girl. (Who, by the way, is also a pan-dimensional dinosaur-person. Who was smuggled to our world for safety and hatched out of an egg. In a Nunnery.) Unsurprisingly, Bob Hoskins (who played Mario) hadn't even heard of the game prior to signing up for the role. Really. It's grade A Snark Bait and even Nintendo mocks this one.
- And Luigi gets the Princess.
  - To be fair, the Princess was called Daisy, rather than Peach (or Toadstool, as she was known in America at the time), even though she was more like Peach than Daisy. The idea of Luigi and Daisy being an item became a sort of RetCanon in later Mario games. In Daisy's first appearance in Super Mario Land, she was nothing more than a Jonas Quinn for Peach.
- On the other hand, this review gives several reasons to why the Super Mario movie is a genuine underappreciated masterpiece. Be warned that the article contains spoilers.
- According to this interview, Shigeru Miyamoto believes the movie failed because it was too much like the games, which makes one wonder what Miyamoto would consider to not be like the games. (Of course, he could have been confused and was instead talking about the obscure Japanese Anime. The latter is actually a little bit closer to what fans had imagined when they first heard about a "Super Mario Disney Movie".)
- This troper has always found it interesting that the creature designer of this movie would later go on to mangle Godzilla in the American remake.
- The Cyberpunk setting can be explained; the directors of the movie, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, had previously created Max Headroom.
- Nintendo Power, in their overview of the series, mentioned the movie. They then said, "Yes, it happened. Let us speak no more of it."
- The Super Mario Bros Movie was a decent Fish Out Of Water adventure story featuring heroes Trapped In Another World. It just wasn't a particularly good Super Mario Bros movie.
Preemptive strike: the now-in-production Shadow Of The Colossus film; the producer for the adaptation previously worked on The Scorpion King and the writer previously penned the above-mentioned Legend of Chun-Li film. Things already aren't looking good, and the film's just in pre-production. (And besides, how do you even make a movie of a game that's essentially one long Boss Rush?)
- This troper has to wonder why they wanted to make a movie of SOTC at all. It's an amazing game but it really doesn't lend well to a movie...Unless they change it(which I'm sure they will) which will just result in not only this trope but will likely start a baww fest of epic proportions with this troper included in said fest.
- Seconded by this troper, who is of the opinion that Shadow of the Colossus is an art form crafted for video gaming, which is an immersing art form, as opposed to reading stories or sitting and watching a movie. Those are passive, as you don't have the control, which is what made Shadow of the Colossus special; the feeling of taking down the colossi. Taking that and putting it in a passive art form, simply watching it on a screen without being part of it, completely defeats the crux of what made the art form so breathtaking.
- It could have been worse. They could've tried to make ICO instead.

Parodies:

Mocked endlessly with fake trailers for PacMan and Minesweeper.
But what if we get an eight?
Then God help us all.

<Later>

Careful! There are mines under there!

Come on, it's never the first one. <BOOM>

Noooooo!

Actually, the minesweeper one seems like a pretty solid setup for a decent movie if handled right. Comedy meets psychological horror (the creepy yellow dude).

Parodied in a fan-made poster◊ for a Sonic The Hedgehog movie, starring Keanu Reeves with only a blue jacket as his "costume".
- You can't not love Danny DeVito as Robotnik, though.
Parodied in Jeremy "Norm" Scott's Hsu and Chan comics:
Hsu: It will be a cold day in Hell before we compromise our principles.
Hollywood Director: It works like this— You get a fat check, we take complete creative control of the project, trample all over your established characters and storyline, then hand the whole thing off to an NYU film drop out with two shampoo commercials to his credit, who will most likely turn the film into a cross between a high school drama production and a Duran Duran video.
Chan: DEAL!
Hsu: Can we cash these today?
*the brothers are seen leaving the office with a large sum of money in their hands*
Chan: We have unique principles brother.
In the popular comic strip Get Fuzzy, Bucky writes up a script for "Pong: The Movie".
Doubt: The Video Game. Some ideas just don't work out well.