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One of the more amusing TikToks that followed the announcement of the forthcoming Legend of Zelda movie riffs on a scene from the animated series Drawn Together. In it, the blue-caped Captain Hero sits in a wheelchair at the bottom of a staircase next to the text “Zelda fans when the movie was announced.” One beat later, the words “it’s live action” appear, and Captain Hero screams. Another beat, then “it’s produced by Avi Arad (Morbius)” flashes up, this time to a louder scream. Finally, “It was written by the writer of Batman v Superman, Rise of Skywalker, and Jurassic Worlld [sic],” and Captain Hero unleashes one last wounded wail.
Even with the slight mistake—the movie's screenwriter, Derek Connolly, did contribute to Jurassic World and Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker but didn’t have anything to do with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—historically, you’d have been naive to bet against this wisdom. Video game adaptations have a rough track record. Yet 2023 saw the release of one critically acclaimed video game adaptation, The Last of Us, which received two dozen Emmy nominations, and one obscenely profitable one, The Super Mario Bros Movie, which made more than a billion dollars worldwide last spring. Even more obscure titles, like Five Nights at Freddy’s and Twisted Metal, made reasonable waves.
This upturn in the fortunes of video game adaptations has coincided with a perceived downturn for comics-based fare. After 15 years of dominance, “superhero fatigue” is now a pervasive talking point. Is there a new hegemon in Hollywood? That might be premature, but 2023 hinted at a future realignment in audience appetites.
For those invested in superheroes’ downfall, the numbers are encouraging. Warner Bros. and DC’s Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and Blue Beetle and, most notoriously, The Flash all bombed, with the latter making just $55 million in North America in its opening weekend, way below projections. For Disney, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania started strongly, then interest cratered, becoming one of the few Marvel films that failed to break even. The Marvels, which cost Disney north of $300 million to make and promote, brought in just $47 million at the domestic box office on its opening weekend, the lowest of any of the MCU’s 33 movies.
Even Bob Iger, the Disney CEO who ultimately signs the Marvel checks, seems at least a little fed up. In June, Iger admitted that oversaturation of Marvel projects, particularly TV shows, had hurt interest in superhero offerings. He weighed in again in late November, admitting that Disney had made too many sequels. Some superheroes—the Batmen, the Spider-Men—should never be counted out, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 brought in $118 million domestically when it opened, but Disney had no billion-dollar releases in 2023. Compare that to eight prior to 2020 (minus Sony’s Spider-Man movies), and then consider that The Super Mario Bros. Movie beat every superhero movie released in 2023, and it’s easy to see Hollywood swerving away from at least some of the more obscure superhero outings in the future.
Super Mario Bros. wasn’t this year's biggest movie—that title goes to Barbie. But from 2010 to 2020, the top 10 movies in North America in any given year were dominated by comic-book heroes. The only video game adaptation to join their ranks was Sonic the Hedgehog, which came out in February 2020, right before Covid-19 closed many theaters and transformed moviegoing habits.
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Mario’s success will lead to a “deluge” of video game adaptations, argues Joost van Druenen, a New York University business professor and author of One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games. Van Dreunen reckons that superheroes are “going the way of the cowboy,” referring to the shifts in Hollywood’s dominant genres (think: the rise of zombies a few years back, all the Home Alone-esque family movies in the 1990s). Even a show like The Boys, he argues, with its anti-superheroes, looks like a kind of turning point, akin to the revisionist Westerns, exemplified by Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, that began to dominate the genre at the end of the ’60s and into the ’70s.
Provided audiences are as tired of superheroes as pundits think, video game protagonists could profitably fill the gap. They come from well-known franchises and have large, engaged fan bases—two things studios appreciate. Cast your eyes down the development list: God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Assassin’s Creed, continued expansion on The Witcher, among others. Nintendo, which has traditionally resisted film spinoffs, is planning a movie a year; Arcane, widely considered the first title (before The Last of Us) to break the curse of such adaptations, is finally getting a second season. Amazon’s forthcoming Fallout series is being helmed by the same team as Westworld.
“Video game content is now appealing to filmmakers, unlike ever before,” says van Dreunen. “So that’s coming in at the same time the superhero movies are starting to reach their tail end.” Of course, these are not sure things: Gran Turismo’s performance was decidedly average, and it’d be fair to question whether any game character can compete with Mario’s star power. Looking into next year, Fallout will be an early litmus. If it finds a foothold upon release in April, that’ll be the surest sign yet that pop culture is entering its video game adaptation era.
Back to superheroes, artist fatigue is one under-explored factor. Inspiration is lacking. Some are undoubtedly tired of the whole enterprise, but many are just tired of poor films: And clearly, these two factors entwine. “I think it’s the quality of the movie, more so than the superheroes themselves,” says Mark Caplan, who worked in video game licensing for Sony Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox and worked on the three Spider-Man games of the Tobey Maguire era. “Superheroes have always found an audience, whether it’s through paper or through film, television—and it will continue.”
The film critic Richard Brody captured this general listlessness in his lukewarm review of The Marvels. Brody blames copyright restrictions: If artists outside of the multinationals could reimagine superheroes, “fatigue” talk would be moot; that world, unfortunately, is many years away. “What happened to superhero movies?” Brody writes. “How did a genre rooted in astonishment, weirdness, and wonder become a byword for the normative, the familiar, and the mundane?” That’s the astonishment, weirdness, and wonder that game adaptations need to recapture.
