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How Hollywood (Finally) Figured Out Video Game Adaptations

With the success of ‘The Last of Us,’ ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie,’ and Peacock’s ‘Twisted Metal,’ Hollywood has raised the ceiling and the floor for video game adaptations
Sony Pictures/HBO/Peacock/Universal/Getty Images/Ringer illustration

Have you heard about the TV adaptation of a violent PlayStation video game wherein a middle-aged man and a younger companion travel across a postapocalyptic America, fighting off raiders and cannibals in hopes of completing a delivery and finding some semblance of safety?

No, not The Last of Us. In this case, the apocalypse comes from a computer bug, not a fungus; the middle-aged loner is John, not Joel; and his younger companion is a car named Evelyn, not a teen named Ellie. This adaptation is on Peacock, not on HBO; it’s a half-hour dramedy, not an hour-long prestige drama; and the source material isn’t Naughty Dog’s 2013 classic, but the considerably less celebrated vehicular combat series Twisted Metal.

Another difference: Peacock’s take on Twisted Metal, which came out late last month, probably won’t win any Emmys. It definitely won’t be nominated 24 times. I’d argue, though, that it actually bodes better for the future of video game adaptations than The Last of Us did.

Yeah, that’s a claim that requires some support. Allow me to make my case.

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This has been a banner year for video game adaptations. The Last of Us, which aired during an otherwise slow spot on the cultural calendar, from mid-January to mid-March, fulfilled the dream of a prestige video game adaptation, which once seemed as remote as a cure for the Cordyceps infestation. And it wasn’t the kind of critical darling that no one watched unless they were reviewing it: 30 to 40 million people tuned in to Joel and Ellie’s cross-country trip from week to week, qualifying the series as a House of the Dragon–huge hit. (The only show to out-Emmy-nomination it, Succession, was watched by about a third as many people, though every single one of them podcasted, tweeted, or blogged about it.) For two months, a video game adaptation dominated TV.

A few weeks later, a video game adaptation dominated the movies. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which came out in early April, made almost $600 million domestically and more than $1.3 billion worldwide—both record figures for 2023, at least until Barbie inevitably beats them. The timing of The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s triumph seemed symbolic: 30 years after the first Mario movie bombed, setting the tone for the terrible adaptations that followed, Hollywood had finally made amends for that misfire. Absolved of its original sin, the video game adaptation was free to flourish.

The one-two combo of The Last of Us and The Super Mario Bros. Movie put every doubt about the ceiling of video game adaptations to rest. Yes, video game adaptations could be critically acclaimed and awarded. And yes, whether TV or movie, live-action or animated, Sony or Nintendo, they could generate massive popular appeal. At long last, the so-called curse was lifted.

However, it wasn’t necessarily safe to extrapolate from the success of The Last of Us and The Super Mario Bros. Movie because each was an outlier in at least one way. The Last of Us was singularly suited to a TV adaptation: Its linear narrative, modeled on the sort of cinematic, literary properties prestige TV eats up, was so ready-made for a live-action version that the cutscenes strung together already looked like low-budget HBO. Super Mario Bros., meanwhile, is the medium’s most iconic IP. The Super Mario Bros. Movie wasn’t even especially inspired; it’s not as if Illumination gave Mario the Across the Spider-Verse or Mutant Mayhem treatment. The Mario movie was fun, faithful, and fairly forgettable. That a merely competently made Mario movie became a billion-dollar juggernaut must be partly attributable to its built-in audience, and no other game series can claim equivalent name recognition or generational loyalty. (Though the recently enriched Nintendo will surely try to port other properties to the big screen.)

That Sony, Nintendo, and their production partners didn’t fumble those bags was still a significant sign that the bad old days of video game adaptations were behind us. But how far would the good days extend? Arguing that The Last of Us and The Super Mario Bros. Movie portended many more quality adaptations to come was like arguing that Shohei Ohtani’s arrival inaugurated a new era of MLB two-way players. Maybe, but how many people have the capacity to be among the fastest-throwing, hardest-hitting, fastest-running, and most durable players in the highest-level league? You’d like to see someone with fewer physical gifts make it work before you declare the lasting end of a decades-long drought. Similarly, you’d like to see some games that are less primed for adaptation give rise to great TV shows or movies before bat-flipping for real. 

Enter Twisted Metal.

There’s no great reason why a Twisted Metal adaptation should work. Although the best entries in the series, such as Twisted Metal: Black and Twisted Metal 2, featured memorable character designs and an absurdist, Mad Max–ian aesthetic, the franchise isn’t known for its narratives. Also, those high points of the series came out three and four PlayStations ago, respectively. There hasn’t been a new installment since 2012, so long ago that the video game genre Twisted Metal belongs to is essentially extinct. The day the last Twisted Metal game came out, Sony Pictures announced that a movie was in the works, but the project fell apart: The game didn’t sell well, and Sony was concerned that the fan base wasn’t big enough to justify an expensive production. That fan base can’t be any bigger in 2023.

And yet, Twisted Metal rules.

It’s got a good cast: Anthony Mackie, excelling and accelerating as amnesiac “milkman” delivery driver John Doe (a more comedic part than he’s typically played); Stephanie Beatriz as his companion and love interest, Quiet; Thomas Haden Church as above-the-law lawman Agent Stone; and Samoa Joe and Will Arnett, tag-teaming the body and voice, respectively, of vigilante sadistic clown Sweet Tooth. It bears the irreverent tone of Zombieland and Deadpool, previous projects of its creators, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. It has heart, humor, and practical effects, and it’s always in on its own dumb jokes, a credit to writer Michael Jonathan Smith (best known for Cobra Kai) and the actors who consistently sell them. No one would or should take it as seriously as The Last of Us, despite the superficial similarities I teased up top, and Twisted Metal wouldn’t want them to: It’s silly, it’s snappy, and it doesn’t take up too much of your time. I went in with no expectations—no good ones, anyway—and binged all 10 half-hour episodes almost as quickly as Calypso could’ve thanked me for watching.

Peacock claims the campy comedy is the service’s “most-binged” premiere in its genre, and Nielsen says it was one of the most-streamed originals during its first week. As usual, we don’t have hard numbers on audience size, so we can’t say precisely how many more multiples of people watched The Last of Us than this. (I’ll go with “a lot.”) We do have more specific figures about the percentage of critics who liked it, and the answer, per Rotten Tomatoes, is 70, which is also a lot lower than The Last of Us’s 96.

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I’d side with the 96 percent; the wisdom of crowds is closer to my sentiments. Still, even a 70 is worth celebrating, considering the track record. Rotten Tomatoes would call that score “fresh,” but even if we call it a C-minus, anything that starts with “C” sounds good on an F-filled report card.

I didn’t foresee that such a strong score would come from a dormant franchise that seemed somewhat miscast as the source for a series. Twisted Metal games lack at least some of the ingredients of a no-doubt adaptation, and when the show was announced in 2019, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who wondered why it got a green light. Now I’m glad it did—and in light of recent releases, maybe I should have had more faith before my binge began.

Although The Last of Us and The Super Mario Bros. Movie have been the biggest hits, the quality of shows and movies based on video games—along with shows and movies about video games—has been climbing for a few years. With due deference to the ongoing prominence of the Pokémon anime, Netflix’s Castlevania started the surge in 2017. Detective Pikachu and The Angry Birds Movie 2 rose to respectability in 2019, followed by Sonic the Hedgehog and Dragon’s Dogma in 2020; Arcane, Werewolves Within, and Mortal Kombat in 2021; and, last year, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Halo, Sonic Prime, and Uncharted (which wasn’t very good but did make money).

These days, even the “bad” video game adaptations are kind of OK, which means there are far fewer flops that stain the name of game adaptations at large. Until very recently, the worst ones weren’t just bad; they were abysmal. Now, not only do the waves of adaptations peak in spectacular crests, but the troughs don’t sink so low. Take Gran Turismo, which comes out later this month. It’s not exactly a video game adaptation—it’s more like a loose adaptation of the real-life story of a guy who got good at racing by playing the game. Still, it’s evidently very video gamey, so I think it counts. As I write this, Gran Turismo’s Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 59 percent, and the “critics consensus” calls it a “generally solid racing movie.”

“Generally solid” doesn’t sound exciting, but starting with Super Mario Bros., it took 26 years and three dozen duds for someone to make a video game movie with a Rotten Tomatoes score at least that high (Detective Pikachu). The average score of every live-action video game movie made in English prior to that was 19 or 20 percent, depending on whether you use the median or the mean—and that’s excluding Uwe Boll’s Far Cry and Dolph Lundgren paycheck Dead Trigger, which mercifully lack Tomatometer readings. In that crowd, “generally solid” would have been a big win.

Given that track record, it was just as important to stop earning nominations for Razzies as it was to start earning nominations for Emmys—to raise not just the ceiling, but also the floor. Lately, game adaptations have hit both of those goals, and I don’t think it’s because critics are pulling their punches or Rotten Tomatoes is inflating its scores. Years ago, sports analyst Phil Birnbaum wrote that because “eliminating stupidity is easier than creating brilliance … you gain more by not being stupid, than you do by being smart.” When teams hire sabermetricians to help them win, he speculated, “Most of the benefit comes from the ‘negative’ side: having a framework that flags bad decisions before they get made.” Thus, he concluded, if he were running an R&D department, he’d instruct it to “concentrate on eliminating bad decisions, not on making good decisions better.”

Shortly after Twisted Metal premiered, I spoke to two people in the business of minimizing bad decisions about video game adaptations: Asad Qizilbash and Carter Swan, the president and senior producer, respectively, of PlayStation Productions, which was founded in 2019 to help adapt Sony’s games for TV and film. The duo coproduced Uncharted, The Last of Us, Twisted Metal, and Gran Turismo and are working on the company’s upcoming projects, which reportedly include God of War, Horizon, Days Gone, Ghost of Tsushima, Gravity Rush, and Jak and Daxter.

In identifying why video game adaptations have begun to go right more than they go wrong, Qizilbash and Swan lent credence to the power of four factors I’ve written about before. The first is that video games have been deeply entrenched in the culture long enough for the creators (and, in some cases, green-lighters) of game adaptations to have grown up as gamers. “Some of the best writers, creators, directors, producers, they’ve actually grown up playing our games, and they have a love and a passion for our games,” Qizilbash says. “I think then because they’re fans themselves, they know what best to adapt, what to take in, what to pull out. … Having them passionately know the game really makes it high quality.”

Yes, it sounds obvious that game adaptations might be better if the people who make them care about the games, but that wasn’t always the case. (Remember, we’re not talking about being brilliant; we’re talking about avoiding dumb mistakes.) Twisted Metal is Reese’s favorite game. He’s 47, which would have made him about 19 when the first Twisted Metal debuted. The math checks out. Smith, 38, has also said he loved Twisted Metal as a kid. The 52-year-old Craig Mazin, who cowrote the TV version of The Last of Us—and really loves the game—is a lifelong gamer whose list of favorites dates back decades. (Mazin, who made Chernobyl before TLOU, also wrote for the upcoming Borderlands movie—though in an ominous sign, he’s since had his name removed from the film.) And because game adaptations can be passion projects for people who played the games, quality creators are increasingly eager to get involved, especially now that these projects aren’t seen as career killers.

Second, the people who make the adaptations now tend to work with the people who made the game. “People with key decisions, like PlayStation Productions, are from the gaming side, and so they understand and respect and love games,” Qizilbash says. Via Qizilbash’s company, Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe was “engaged very early on” with the TV adaptation and was “involved the whole way through.” Swan adds, “He’s always there if we need ideas or we need to ask if we’re staying within … the universe of Twisted Metal that he helped create.”

In more narrative-heavy games, the original creators may play even more direct roles in the adaptation, as Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann did with The Last of Us. No longer is it assumed that the makers of the game will hand over the creative reins to the TV makers or moviemakers, as it was when one production company told Druckmann, “You guys are really good with gameplay; we’ll take the story from here and refine it.” Instead, Druckmann helped refine it himself. Nintendo, having learned its lesson by declining a creative role in making the first Mario Bros. movie, worked closely with Illumination in crafting the new one.

There’s too much at stake financially and reputationally for game makers to turn over their IP to another party. And because the video game industry dwarfs the movie industry and goes toe to toe with TV in total revenue, gaming publishers have leverage that they didn’t decades ago; there aren’t many movie tie-in games anymore, but Hollywood wants to hawk its wares in Fortnite or Roblox. Plus, the companies that commission many adaptations, such as Netflix and Amazon, may understand what they’re working with because they make games themselves (and because game engines are now being used to make movies and TV).

Third, TV’s ascendance as a home for high-quality, big-budget entertainment has been a boon to game adaptations, because its episodic structure and greater possible screen time are often a more natural fit for a game. “I think that was part of the problem you saw in the past,” Swan says. “Trying to force a game that has 80, 90 hours of narrative into two hours can be problematic.” Now, producers can pick a lane depending on the project. “With theatrical,” Qizilbash says, “you can imagine really big, incredible set pieces that could be wonderful with big surround sound on the screen, [whereas] TV does a really good job of going deep in character and exploring multiple characters that maybe you couldn’t in the game.”

Fourth, characters and stories in games have gotten more mature, nuanced, and sophisticated as technology has enabled designers to expand their programming palettes. Early live-action adaptations centered on titles that were light on plot—Mario, Double Dragon, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat—because back when bits could be counted on two hands (or a little later, hands and feet), stories weren’t what made most games popular. As greater processing power and storage space allowed for realistic graphics, more expansive settings, fully voiced lines, increased interactivity, and lifelike, motion-captured animation, storytelling in video games evolved. Some adaptations still draw on games that date back decades (like Twisted Metal), but more and more will try to tap richer narrative veins.

They’ll still have to take care in deciding how to do that, so as to cater to all crowds without alienating the existing fan base. “You don’t want to change it too much to the point where they show up and they say, ‘There’s nothing in common with this version and the game that I love,’” Swan says. “But I think you also have to always be aware that a lot of people showing up to watch hopefully are not aware of the game and not have played the game.” Finally, he says, “You don’t want to copy the game, because if you just copy the game, then the fans have already played it, and as a viewing experience, there’ll be nothing new; there’ll be nothing exciting.”

That’s definitely not the way it worked with Twisted Metal, where, Swan says, “Rhett and Paul came up with a world and a way into this that if the game didn’t even exist, it would still have been a great show.” According to Qizilbash, the fact that the franchise was dormant allowed the creators to take a lot of liberties. Different games demand different adaptation approaches: Uncharted was a prequel to the games, The Last of Us was a fairly faithful adaptation, and Gran Turismo sidesteps the games entirely. As for Twisted Metal: Just as 2021’s Mortal Kombat movie didn’t feature a fighting tournament, Twisted Metal doesn’t feature the series’ signature arena-style car combat. The creators decided to save that for Season 2. 

“Before you start having [characters] square off in arena combat and just pure action, we really wanted to establish a world and create a bunch of characters that you really cared about and you could really connect to and relate to,” Swan says. “The plan was always, ‘Let’s get to where the game goes,’ but I think if you look at the movie Gladiator, you couldn’t start off just with them in the Colosseum in the first act; you wouldn’t care nearly as much. You’ve got to set up the stakes of these people that are actually participating.”

Adapting Twisted Metal at all is pretty risky. Adapting Twisted Metal and, while you’re at it, forfeiting the championship match? It’s a bold strategy, but it paid off for ’em. And if that can work, well, why can’t the many more adaptations in progress? After The Last of Us, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Twisted Metal, video game adaptations have little left to prove. The more successes they have, the more their momentum will build. Though there may be one more achievement left to unlock: Someday, when an adaptation dud does come along, no one will say that it failed simply because it was based on a video game. They’ll have forgotten that used to be a bad thing.

Ben Lindbergh
Ben is a writer, podcaster, and editor who covers culture and sports. He hosts ‘Effectively Wild’ at FanGraphs and previously wrote for FiveThirtyEight and Grantland, served as editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, and authored ‘The MVP Machine’ and ‘The Only Rule Is It Has to Work.’

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