We may still be a few months away from Summer Blockbuster Season, but that hasn’t stopped diehard World of Warcraft fans gearing up for the big screen adaptation of their favourite MMO, the Duncan Jones directed Warcraft, due to hit cinema screens on June 10th.
At time of writing, little was known about the film beyond a basic synopsis (humans take on orcs deep in the heart of Azeroth), but it certainly had us thinking about other big video game crossers.
Sure, there’s been plenty of flops (Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, we’re looking squarely at you. 1994’s Double Dragon, you don’t get off scot free either), but for either cinematic disasterpiece, there’s been plenty of of games that have successfully leapt from console to screen.
With that in mind, here’s our rundown of the top five video games movies that stand out from the crowd.
Silent Hill
Released back in 2006, Silent Hill garnered some criticism for its lengthy run time, but on the whole, it proved to be one of the year’s best horror films, and certainly one of the most entertaining video game movies launched in the last decade.
Mortal Kombat
Serious cinephiles may hate it, but we can’t help love this 1990s adaptation of one of the most famous beat-em-ups of all time. Sure it was campy, sure it had it’s moments (ok, lots of moments) of bad acting, but for sheer entertainment value, the 1995 blockbuster (starring Christopher Lambert as Lord Rayden, Linden Ashby as Johnny Cage and Chris Casamassa as this writer’s favourite MK character, Scorpion) is hard to top.
Resident Evil
It was way back in 1996 when the first Resident Evil game first pounced on an unsuspecting, Playstation-playing pubic and pretty much changed things forever. This thing had everything; action, horror movie suspense, and all the blood-curdling fun you’d expect from a top video game release. So it’s perhaps not too surprising that, 20 years on, the Capcom creation remains one of the most successful videogame franchises of all times.
We’ve seen the novels, the comic books, we’ve even seen a Resident Evil slot game featured on casino sites like https://www.williamhill.com.au/, but it’s the series of movies we’re most interested in today.
Though the likes of Resident Evil: Apocalypse certainly divided opinion (with hardcore fans typically choosing to loathe it and everybody else enjoying it for the throwaway fun it was perhaps intended to be), there’s no doubting that with a total worldwide box office gross of $915 million plus, Resident Evil has so far proved success in shooting its way from the PlayStation to the cinema screen.
Prince of Persia
An oft-forgotten classic in the video game movie genre, Prince of Persia was released back in 2010 with Mike Newell directing Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton and Ben Kingsley in Walt Disney Pictures’ adaptation of the Ubisoft owned gaming franchise.
Much like Resident Evil above, Prince of Persia’s popularity among hardcore fans has been such that the game has branched out into mobile games, graphic novels and other media, but for our money, the 2010 Sands of Time film was the best incarnation of the characters and plot, outside the games themselves of course.
Tron
Released over a full decade before the ill-fated Super Mario Bros. movie hit the screens and convinced studio execs that films based on games were a good idea, Jeff Bridges found himself stuck inside a malicious video game in what remains one of the most highly praised video game movies of all time, despite not actually being based on a game itself.