Street Fighter is always going to suffer in comparison to, say, Die Hard, but if you consider it in the context of similar fare, things start to look a little more impressive. It’s useless to judge video-game movies the way we judge other movies, so Vulture has decided to weigh them exclusively against their peers.
#BOSS MONSTER HEROES OF YORE MOVIE#
Promising growth is happening in the game movie space, and for that we should rejoice!īut while the paradigm might be shifting ever so slightly, B-movie status is historically the ceiling on these kinds of products. Alicia Vikander’s Tomb Raider has garnered a respectable chorus of supporters in the years since its release, and 2021’s Werewolves Within turned out to be a straight up gem. It eked out a positive critical consensus and even reintroduced the singular physical comedy stylings of Jim Carrey after a long Serious Film hiatus. But things started to change with the arrival of Sega and Paramount’s lovable live-action Sonic the Hedgehog in 2020.
In the three decades since the release of the first game-to-screen movie, 1993’s Super Mario Bros., there have been precious few good entries in the genre (in a critical sense). Something has happened in video-game adaptations over the past few years.
This article was originally published in 2016 and has been updated to include recent releases, including this month’s Sonic 2. Photo-Illustration: Vulture/Photos by Universal Pictures, Capcom, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, Midway, Buena Vista Pictures, Sony Pictures Releasing and Core Design