The 10 Best Movies and Shows Adapted From Video Games

Video game adaptations have been Hollywood’s white whale for a long time now, and it’s only been somewhat recently that they’ve stepped out of the shadows of being regarded as cult classics (Paul W.S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat) to the widely derided (Mike Newell’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Uwe Boll’s entire filmography).

Now, adapting a video game is becoming slightly more mainstream. Importantly, the adapted movies and shows are consistently much better than in the past. From the notable classics to know to newer offerings, these are the options most worth watching that you’ll recognize from the gaming consoles of your youth.

Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo star as Mario Mario and Luigi Mario in this adaption of Nintendo’s Mario series. It came out a full 30 years before the 2023 animated feature starring Chris Pratt by Illumination Entertainment. Mario and Luigi are plumbers from Brooklyn who discover an alternate version of Manhattan in the sewers (called Dinohattan) where humanity evolved from dinosaurs, not apes, and is ruled over by the evil King Koopa (Dennis Hopper).

Although it has garnered some amount of critical reappraisal in recent years, the film was plagued by production issues and Hoskins famously called it “the worst thing [he] ever did” in an interview with The Guardian. Even Dennis Hopper said on Late Night with Conan O’Brien that he only did it so his son could have shoes. His son’s response? “Dad, I don’t need shoes that badly.”

The Muscles from Brussels Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as American Airforce Colonel William F. Guile, who leads a multinational fighting force to take down M. Bison (Raul Julia, in his final onscreen performance), a drug lord-turned general of the nation of Shadaloo.

Based on Capcom’s fighting game series Street Fighter, the film deviates pretty heavily from the games (Chun Li is depicted as a reporter instead of an Interpol agent, series protagonists Ryu and Ken Masters are likewise depicted as well-meaning conmen instead of Ansatsuken practitioners). If you want an authentic Street Fighter experience, you’d probably be better served watching Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (1994), but the live action adaptation isn’t without its charms, most of which are present in Julia’s performance as M. Bison, who he wanted to play due to his childrens’ love of the game series.

Adapted from the Capcom horror series of the same name, Resident Evil stars Milla Jovovich as Alice, an amnesiac who joins forces with a Special Forces unit to infiltrate The Hive, a clandestine research facility hidden underneath a spooky mansion that’s been locked down to contain the spread of a zombifying virus. This is an adaptation in the loosest sense of the word in that it only vaguely follows the plot of the first RE game, which may rub purists the wrong way, but director Paul W.S. Anderson is laughing all the way to the bank as they’ve made six of these movies and every single one of them has turned a tidy profit, while allowing him to show off how cool and badass his wife is (Anderson and Jovovich have been married since 2009).

The 2021 adaption of the überviolent NetherRealm Studios fighting game series forgoes the series’ traditional hero Liu Kang in favor of washed up MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan), who gets press-ganged into fighting in an extradimensional martial arts tournament called Mortal Kombat against a bunch of creeps and weirdos from a place called Outworld because prophecy states he’s the only one who can stop our extradimensional neighbor from scoring their 10th victory in the tournament (thereby giving them carte blanche to conquer us).

While it lacks some of the campiness of the 1995 Mortal Kombat and its 1997 sequel, there’s a lot to like for fans of the game series. Most notable however, is that this movie casts a pre-Shōgun Tadanobu Asano and Hiroyuki Sanada as thunder god/steward of Earthrealm Raiden and vengeful undead ninja Scorpion respectively (arguably two of the game’s most iconic characters).

Forest ranger Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson) finds himself in something of a sticky situation when a freak snowstorm traps him in an inn with the disgruntled residents of a Vermont town who all suspect each other of being a werewolf in this mystery horror comedy adapted from the UBISoft VR game of the same name.

Widely praised for its writing, the main draw is Richardson, who you’ll doubtlessly recognize from comedies like Veep, Detroiters, and I Think You Should Leave. However, the rest of the cast is similarly storied, with recognizable up-and-comer Harvey Guillén (What We Do In The Shadows’s Guillermo), HBO mainstay Glenn Fleshler (Boardwalk Empire, True Detective, Barry) and ubiquitous AT&T commercial presence Milana Vayntrub supporting.

Ella Purnell stars as Lucy MacLean, a plucky resident of Vault 33, forced out into the apocalyptic wasteland of the late 23rd century when her father Hank is captured by raiders from the irradiated surface in this recent adaptation of the Bethesda RPG series of the same name.

Longtime fans of the series may complain that the Vault Dweller angle is a little played out at this point (the main character of Fallout, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4 is a Vault Dweller who has to leave the safety of the vault for some reason or another), but Purnell turns a great performance that’s only really supplanted (for me, at least) by The Ghoul, an irradiated gunslinger played by Walton Goggins, who’s finally catching a big break after years of killing it in supporting roles in movies and television.

Based on the Konami side-scrolling gothic horror series, Castlevania follows whip-wielding vampire hunter Trevor Belmont as he teams up with magician Sypha Belnades and Dracula’s half-vampire son Alucard to, well, kill Dracula.

Created and written by veteran English comics writer Warren Ellis, the four season animated series contains an exhausting list of guest stars (Peter Stormare! Lance Reddick! Malcolm McDowell!) and draws inspiration from a lot of different entries in the Konami video game series without expecting you to be familiar with Castlevania’s very long and somewhat confusing timeline, which makes it a great watch regardless of how many times you played Symphony of the Night as a kid.

Physically imposing nerd Henry Cavill (soon to be replaced by lower tier Hemsworth sibling Liam in season 4) plays Geralt of Rivia, a mutated monster hunter/sellsword/horndog called a Witcher in this adaption of the Andrzej Sapkowski fantasy novels of the same name, which were heavily popularized across the Atlantic thanks to the CD Projekt RED Witcher games trilogy.

Cavill is well-cast as a hangdog, perennially put-upon Geralt, and fans of the games will notice a lot of similarities in his delivery to Doug Cockle’s (who provides the Witcher’s English voice in the games). If you came to fantasy television by way of Game of Thrones, you may find the world of The Witcher somewhat strange, but the action is suitably crunchy and Geralt’s sidekick, the bard Jaskier, provides a lot of levity and a number of earworm songs that are frustratingly difficult to dislodge once you hear them.

Pedro Pascal stars as Joel, a misanthropic smuggler who lost everything to an outbreak of a zombifying cordyceps fungus who finds himself developing a paternal bond with Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the young woman who he’s been tasked with escorting across the post-collapse United States.

Based on the eternally re-remastered Naughty Dog video game series of the same name, The Last of Us has garnered a lot of praise for its performances, particularly for Nick Offerman (Parks and Rec) and Murray Bartlett (The White Lotus) in the episode “Long, Long Time.” However, whether or not you vibe with it will largely depend on how tired you are of apocalypse and zombie stories at the current moment.

This Netflix animated series is based on the CD Projekt RED video game Cyberpunk 2077 (itself set in the world of Mike Pondsmith’s Cyperpunk tabletop roleplaying game) and follows David Martinez, a young resident of the futuristic cyberpunk dystopia Night City who falls in with a crew of “edgerunners” (high-tech mercenaries for hire) after a devastating personal tragedy leaves him orphaned.

Existing anime fans will probably get the most out of this series, which features (admittedly excellent) animation by Studio Trigger (Delicious in Dungeon, Promare), an animation studio founded by former employees of Gainax (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gurren Lagan, FLCL). But if you’re itching for an escape into a cyberized future a la Ghost in the Shell or Neuromancer, this is probably what you’re looking for (until Blade Runner 2099 comes out).