Summary
Video games andmoviesare a connection that has been seen a lot throughout the years. There have been a lot of movie adaptations of video games, yet surprisingly, they don’t usually work out the way you would expect them to. Most of these movies rarely exceed expectations at the box office, and many of them end up flopping more often than not.
There are many reasons for these movies not performing well, from not sticking to the game’s lore, which makes the core fans angry, to not being enticing enough for casual moviegoers to be excited about. Whatever their reasons, we will list down some of the biggest video game movie flops we have ever seen.
10Borderlands
TheBorderlandsmovie is one of the biggest video game movie flops of recent times. With a budget of $115 million, it made less than $10 million on its opening weekend in the US, which isn’t surprising given its critical reception.
There were a lot of expectations of this movie due to its star cast consisting of famous personalities such as Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis, as well as the popularity of the Borderlands games, but it failed to match these expectations by any means due to a mix of bad CGI and a poor story that barely follows the game at all.
9Alone in the Dark
Alone in the Dark is not only one of the worst video game adaptations but also one of the critically worst-rated movies of all time. The whole movie is just a mess in a lot of ways, with many characters, all of whom are barely introduced properly. The pacing and plot are also very weird, and it honestlymakes it hard to understand what’s going on at most times.
It also doesn’t feel like a horror movie at all, with there being no sense of doom at any time, and the scary scenes coming off more like comedy. This is in complete contrast to the original game released in 1992, which was one of the pioneers of thehorror game genre.
8Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
Although Mortal Kombat: Annihilation didn’t perform horribly at the box office, there is no doubt that it is one of the worst video game movies ever created. This was a sequel to the original 1995 movie, and it somehowmanaged to do even worse, in terms of its special effects, fight scenes, and almost everything else as well.
The Mortal Kombat seriesis one of the most iconic fighting games of all time and this movie managed to disappoint most of its fans across the globe. The failure of this movie was also one of the main reasons we never got to see this series come to a proper conclusion and the whole franchise was ultimately rebooted in 2021.
7Wing Commander
The Wing Commander games were quite ahead of their time in their portrayal of space simulation gameplay, which made the low quality of the movie feel even worse. Although the storyline of the movie is not too bad,it’s its special effects that really let it down.
Some of the most iconic characters from the games, such as the Kilrathi, also look completely different in the movie, which didn’t go down too well with fans. The spaceships and combat also look very low-budget, and considering movies such as The Phantom Menace came out just a couple of months after it, there’s no reasonable excuse for the space sequences being so bad.
6Far Cry
Far Cryis probably the perfect video game to turn into a movie, so the fact that this adaptation did so badly is kinda upsetting. Its box office performance was very poor, and it made less than a million dollars on a budget of $30 million, which tells you all you need to know about it.
The action, which you would expect to be the best part of a Far Cry movie, is very disappointing anddoesn’t even come close to the thrill you would get from playing the game itself.
5The House of the Dead
The House of the Dead is a series ofhorror shooter arcade gamesfrom the 90s and its movie adaptation is one of the worst things we have ever seen. It’s not even one of those movies that is so bad that it is good, it is just plain awful, and watching it feels like a chore, which explains the reason for its bombing at the box office.
Just some of the things wrong with this movie include its bad acting and even worse dialogue, a nonsensical plot, and thepathetic excuse for zombies who aren’t scary or realistic at all.
4Doom
Although it is one of the more successful movies on this list, there is no doubt that Doom (2005) was a big flop at the box office, and didn’t even gross back its budget of $60 million. The movie’s cast, consisting of famous actors such as Karl Urban and Dwayne Johnson, doesn’t do a bad job at all, but the movie’s lack of implementation of the source material is what lets it down.
While Doom the game doesn’t exactly consist of a fully-fleshed out storyline, there are still a lot of things the movie gets wrong in terms of its plot, and the fact that there areno proper gore scenes, which is what the game is known for, is also a huge let-down for fans.
3Bloodrayne
Based on the third-person vampire game,Bloodrayne, the movie was released in 2005 and disappointed fans and critics. The movie didn’t even end up grossing a quarter of its $25 million budget and was a complete flop at the box office.
From its acting to its costume design, which doesn’t even resemble the actual game,there are a lot of things wrong with this movie that would take hours to describe. Sadly, its bad performance was also one of the reasons for the game dying down as well.
2Double Dragon
Unlike some other movies on this list,Double Dragon the movie is so bad that it ends up working as a comedy film. This movie does stick to the script of the game in a few regards, such as its setting, but the overall product is just not good, and from its weird character designs to its bad acting, it doesn’t work at all.
Double Dragon, the game, isall about action, which is quite ironic as most of the fighting scenes in the movie come across as hilarious as it is obvious that the actors aren’t the most well-trained in any form of combat.
1Tekken
As you can probably tell by now, fighting games don’t tend to do too well in the form of movies and Tekken is the prime example of that. With analready fleshed-out universeconsisting of so many interesting characters, and a large fanbase, there is no reason that the Tekken movie shouldn’t have been a hit, yet it ended up sadly performing way below par at the box office as well as critically.
The plot of the movie tries to take the story from the first three games and rewrite it in its own way, but it is missing the charm that makes the games so good. But what makes this movie even worse is that its characters aren’t good enough and that they lack all the personality that they possess in-game.
