From Five Nights At Freddy's To The Last Of Us: The Video Game Curse Has Lifted
"Five Nights at Freddy's" was tracking for a big weekend. In the week leading up to release, the adaptation of the popular video game series was looking at an impressive $50 million bow, up a good $10-$15 million from the original predictions that believed it would top out at $35-$40 million. Turns out, all that tracking was completely wrong. "Five Nights at Freddy's" ended its Halloween opening weekend run pulling in just over $80 million domestically, becoming one of the biggest horror movie opening weekends of all time.
There's a larger conversation to be had about how bad tracking has been at gauging the movie-going habits of teenagers and young adults (the prime audience for blockbusters), but that's a discussion for another day. Today I want to talk about the rise of video game movies and TV series.
I want to state up front that I'm no doom and gloomer when it comes to superhero movies, but there's clearly a feeling in the air that superhero movies, on the whole, are on a decline. Critics are being much tougher on comic book movies and audiences aren't as guaranteed to show up to these movies en masse. If "The Flash" and "Blue Beetle" had come out in 2019 they both would have made double or triple what they ended up raking in at the box office.
That doesn't mean superhero movies are dead, especially with the upcoming James Gunn rebranding of the DCU and Marvel Studios finally getting to take a crack at two of their biggest properties ("X-Men" and "Fantastic Four"). It'd be foolish to count them out, but I do get the sense that the gold rush days of superhero intellectual property are pretty much over and I think the time has finally come for the rise of the video game adaptation.
Video game adaptations have had a rough road to walk
What "Five Nights at Freddy's" is showing is that the audience that grew up with the IP is ready to turn out in droves to see it executed on-screen, especially in a way that isn't some embarrassed deconstruction of the source material. They didn't want a redesign of their characters, they wanted to see the things they saw in the game translated into live-action, especially if they got some deep-cut lore reveals along the way. They don't care about reviews, good or bad, they just want that hit of nostalgia. Not the previous generation's nostalgia, but their own.
In that way, this audience isn't all that dissimilar to the comic book fans who made the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC films box office juggernauts, which is why I think we're about to see a sea change in blockbuster filmmaking.
Video game movies have had a pretty tough road to 2023, with flop after flop beginning back with 1993's "Super Mario Bros." and continuing on with notable failures like "Doom," "Assassin's Creed," the recent "Halo" TV series, "Uncharted," and the "Tomb Raider" reboot. There have been odd successes, like "Sonic the Hedgehog," but for the most part video game adaptations have been something of an eye-roller for audiences and critics alike.
Again, that mirrors the path that superhero movies took. "Superman: The Movie" and 1989's "Batman" aside, the comic book movie just didn't work ... until they did and then they dominated the box office for 20 years.
Superhero cinema is leaving a void that video game movies are filling
While "Five Nights at Freddy's" isn't getting the critical love of, say, Christopher Nolan's "Batman" series, what it is doing is bringing everything the young fans of the video games and all the tie-in books wanted and those fans are reacting to it. My audience was packed and gasped at various character reveals, cheering in parts that reminded me of when Marvel fans saw Nick Fury pop up at the end of "Iron Man" for the first time. This was a nod just to them, not the rest of us old normies in the audience, and they freaked the heck out.
I'm not saying "Five Nights at Freddy's" is the harbinger of the coming of video game adaptations, but it is a big step on that road to video game domination. In fact, I think we may already be here. Illumination's "The Super Mario Bros Movie" clocked in at $1.3 billion in box office receipts, eclipsing "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3," which is the highest-grossing superhero movie worldwide this year (it "only" gathered $845 million).
The argument could be made that the two massive video game adaptation success stories in cinemas this year are aimed squarely at kids, so their success is more indicative of kids wanting to watch movies aimed at them in theaters with their friends and family. There might be some truth there, but this year also saw the runaway success of HBO's "The Last of Us," a show most definitely not made for 9-year-olds.
Video game adaptations got some serious street cred in 2023
We can all agree that if Hollywood is good at anything it's chasing success. If one type of movie is a hit then you better believe all the competing studios are going to rush right out and try to replicate that success for themselves and their shareholders. They usually take the wrong lessons from successes, but that doesn't stop the chase, and you better believe this week started off with studio heads asking what video game rights are available.
The only superhero properties audiences seem to care about are DC and Marvel. You're not seeing a "Maxx" movie being fast-tracked, are you? In that regard, there are only three studios that get to play in the current lucrative trend: Warner Bros., Disney, and Sony, and really Sony's only in there because they had the rights to one of the best Marvel characters and negotiated a deal that kept them in the game.
Video games don't have that problem. HBO was able to strike a deal and make "The Last of Us," Amazon has wrapped production on a "Fallout" series, and there's the continuing threat of someone finally doing something with "Bioshock," "Metal Gear Solid," "Gears of War," and "Ghosts of Tsushima." Sony actually has a leg up on their competition if this IP chase becomes the next big thing since they own their own gaming platform, although that didn't stop the PlayStation exclusive "The Last of Us" from going to HBO.
Gen Z and Alpha are primed to be obsessed with video game movies
This generation that is coming of age as we speak was brought up not only playing video games but obsessed over watching others play video games. If you have kids in your life you know just how big of a deal watching some obnoxious 22-year-old playing "Minecraft" or "Fortnite" is to them.
That is who is now the prime movie-going audience and they're turning out for video game movies in a way that Gen X and Millennials didn't. "The Last of Us" might be the first video game adaptation to lend a sort of Christopher Nolan-esque stamp of quality onto this particular type of IP and we're still waiting for the cinematic equivalent of that to really hammer home just how big video game IP can be with modern audiences, but I feel that day is coming.
Superhero movies can't coast anymore and the momentum seems to be growing for video game adaptations. Those who doubt this inevitability remind me — a remarkably old man who was there when "Batman and Robin" was the kind of superhero movie the studios were turning out on the regular — of the folks who doubted "X-Men" or "Spider-Man" could ever work in live action.
The Hollywood studio system is always waxing and waning and the big, empty space superhero cinema is in danger of leaving behind will be filled with something and all signs are pointing to that something being video game adaptations.