How video game movies got good

Filmmaker and video essayist Patrick H. Willems explains 30 years of game adaptations

Video game adaptations threaten to replace superhero movies as Hollywood's favorite fad. How did Mario and friends evolve from box office poison into some of the most valuable IPS in movie history? Today on Post Games: an extended interview with filmmaker and video essayist Patrick H. Willems, in which we make sense of 30 years and five distinct eras of video game adaptations.

• Act 1: The Doomed Decades

• Act 2: The Hollywood Hits

• A Patreon bonus: The Future of Video Game Movies

  • Patrick sticks around to speculate on the future of video game adaptations – including no fewer than 46 movies in active development

• Act 3: The News of the Week

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Next Monday, subscribers will get an audiobook version of the history of Street Fighter: The Movie!

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Act 1: The Doomed Decades

• When The Faithful Adaptation Is Actually Worse (Patrick H Willems on YouTube)

• Patrick H Willems' Nebula channel (Nebula)

• The Making of the Super Mario Bros. Movie (The Gaming Historian)

• ‘Mortal Kombat’: Untold Story of the Movie That “Kicked the Hell” Out of Everyone (Hollywood Reporter)

• The world’s biggest Street Fighter movie fan explains why it’s an accidental masterpiece (Polygon)

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Act 2: The Hollywood Hits

• Video game movies, ranked by Tomato Meter (Rotten Tomatoes)

• Warcraft ½-star review (RogerEbert.com)

• A positive review of Warcraft (Keith and the Movies)

• The fastest interview ever with Ben Schwartz from Sonic the Hedgehog (Polygon on YouTube)

• The Last of Us enters perilous territory (Vulture)

• ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ Hits $1.3 Billion Globally, Surpassing ‘Frozen’ as Second-Biggest Animated Film of All Time (Variety)

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Patreon bonus: The future of video game movies

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Act 3: News of the week

• Why Silksong took seven years to make (Bloomberg)

• Hollow Knight: Silksong - Release Trailer (Team Cherry on YouTube)

• Sony is raising PS5 prices, starting tomorrow (The Verge)

• Microsoft is raising prices on Xbox consoles, controllers, and games worldwide (The Verge)

• Nintendo raises the Switch 1 price from $299 to $339 (The Verge)

• Can Garfield Kart 2 compete with Hollow Knight: Silksong? Who cares, dude? (Polygon)

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Also on Patreon

• The future of video game movies, including audio and links

• This week in video game links

• Free game of the week

• What else I’m enjoying