With Superheroes Slumping, Hollywood Turns To Video Games For Films – As millennials step into the C-suite and superhero movies come off a truly awful 2023 at the box office, video games are the next big thing.
With Superheroes Slumping, Hollywood Turns To Video Games For Films – As millennials step into the C-suite and superhero movies come off a truly awful 2023 at the box office, video games are the next big thing.
“The superhero genre, once the bastion of bankability for studios like Disney, Warner Bros. and Sony, is in a slump. In 2023, all three of Warner Bros.’ DC films vastly underperformed. Sony’s February release “Madame Web” bombed so hard Sydney Sweeney joked on “SNL” that no one saw it. And even Marvel Studios, which routinely cranked out $700 million to $1 billion-grossing hits, stumbled with “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels” — both critical and commercial letdowns.
The superhero genre isn’t dead — Hollywood is still investing heavily in the years ahead — but it is wavering, which is causing studios to consider the “next big thing” should the genre go the way of the Western.
Now all eyes are on making video games, a $56.6 billion industry in 2022, the next movie tentpole IP. Despite failing for the better part of three decades to successfully adapt a video game into a box office hit, Hollywood is banking that the moment has finally arrived.
Recent video game-inspired hits (including “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s”), evolving audience interest and current investments all point to a new era for video games in Hollywood. Not only do video game movies cater to the primary interest of younger generations, but those making decisions at a studio level today grew up playing next-generation games that are now being mined for franchise potential, industry insiders told TheWrap.
Upcoming theatrical titles like “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” “Borderlands” and “Minecraft” are generating buzz, while Disney recently announced a $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games, the studio behind the mega-popular game “Fortnite.”
And studios are keeping quality top of mind in the wake of a 30-year stretch of poorly received adaptations that coined the phrase “video game movie curse.”
“In Hollywood, IP is king, and some of these games like ‘Gran Turismo,’ for example, have huge fan bases that haven’t been adapted yet,” Carter Swan, senior producer, IP Expansion at PlayStation, told TheWrap. “This generation of filmmakers and studio execs grew up with games being a much bigger part of their lives and are just more excited than the previous generations to adapt these stories.”
According to a survey of 3,500 fans conducted by Fandom and released in March, 67% of fans are spending the same or more time consuming content or playing video games. But their behavior is shifting — 33% are spending less time on cable or in theaters, and the number one activity they’re switching to is gaming.
Millennials and Gen Z, where Hollywood is aiming its focus, are an “elusive” audience, said producer Adrian Askarieh, who produced movies based on the video game series “Hitman.” So finding their primary point of interest is key.
“For them, video games and video game characters are similar to what the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby Marvel characters were for Generation X, but on a far more visceral level,” he told TheWrap. Askarieh added that the fact writers and filmmakers in top positions grew up playing these games has fueled a pivot by networks and studios to produce acclaimed adaptations like HBO’s “The Last of Us.”
“I can’t think of another time where it has been so competitive to acquire film/TV rights to video game IP, and not just the major ones either,” he said.
Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures, which after a stretch of well-received but commercially disappointing prestige films has mostly gotten out of the movie business (aside from last year’s Oscar-nominated animated feature “Nimona”), is looking to get back in the game by adapting some of their popular video games, several sources told TheWrap.
Annapurna already announced an adaptation of their game “Stray,” where the player is a cat in a futuristic, “Blade Runner”-esque city. And several other games are being adapted into features at the studio, both live-action and animated, TheWrap has learned.
The highest-grossing movie of 2023 after “Barbie” was Universal and Illumination’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which drummed up more than $1 billion at the global box office and spawned a sequel set for release in 2026. Around the same time that Mario was jumping down warp pipes, HBO was airing “The Last of Us,” starring Pedro Pascal, an Emmy-nominated sensation that was based on a more adult-skewing survival video game series.
These titles pack a vital combination of well-known IP and big, theater-worthy storytelling, brought to life by cutting-edge technology from creatives who know and respect the source material. But they’re far from the first attempts to get video games to click on the big screen.”
tempesttune on
They won’t ever fully go the way of the western as Marvel Studios needs to make money and they have nothing to make other than superhero movies.
But they just won’t just get massive $200M+ budgets expecting $700M+ WW anymore except the A listers like Batman & Spider-Man.
They’ll probably pivot to doing cheap street level stuff like Blade, Daredevil, and Punisher after Thunderbolts, Captain Falcon, and FF4 flop back to back.
WB will probably just scrap everything and do a Batfamily cinematic universe or something.
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Full text:
“The superhero genre, once the bastion of bankability for studios like Disney, Warner Bros. and Sony, is in a slump. In 2023, all three of Warner Bros.’ DC films vastly underperformed. Sony’s February release “Madame Web” bombed so hard Sydney Sweeney joked on “SNL” that no one saw it. And even Marvel Studios, which routinely cranked out $700 million to $1 billion-grossing hits, stumbled with “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels” — both critical and commercial letdowns.
The superhero genre isn’t dead — Hollywood is still investing heavily in the years ahead — but it is wavering, which is causing studios to consider the “next big thing” should the genre go the way of the Western.
Now all eyes are on making video games, a $56.6 billion industry in 2022, the next movie tentpole IP. Despite failing for the better part of three decades to successfully adapt a video game into a box office hit, Hollywood is banking that the moment has finally arrived.
Recent video game-inspired hits (including “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s”), evolving audience interest and current investments all point to a new era for video games in Hollywood. Not only do video game movies cater to the primary interest of younger generations, but those making decisions at a studio level today grew up playing next-generation games that are now being mined for franchise potential, industry insiders told TheWrap.
Upcoming theatrical titles like “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” “Borderlands” and “Minecraft” are generating buzz, while Disney recently announced a $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games, the studio behind the mega-popular game “Fortnite.”
And studios are keeping quality top of mind in the wake of a 30-year stretch of poorly received adaptations that coined the phrase “video game movie curse.”
“In Hollywood, IP is king, and some of these games like ‘Gran Turismo,’ for example, have huge fan bases that haven’t been adapted yet,” Carter Swan, senior producer, IP Expansion at PlayStation, told TheWrap. “This generation of filmmakers and studio execs grew up with games being a much bigger part of their lives and are just more excited than the previous generations to adapt these stories.”
According to a survey of 3,500 fans conducted by Fandom and released in March, 67% of fans are spending the same or more time consuming content or playing video games. But their behavior is shifting — 33% are spending less time on cable or in theaters, and the number one activity they’re switching to is gaming.
Millennials and Gen Z, where Hollywood is aiming its focus, are an “elusive” audience, said producer Adrian Askarieh, who produced movies based on the video game series “Hitman.” So finding their primary point of interest is key.
“For them, video games and video game characters are similar to what the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby Marvel characters were for Generation X, but on a far more visceral level,” he told TheWrap. Askarieh added that the fact writers and filmmakers in top positions grew up playing these games has fueled a pivot by networks and studios to produce acclaimed adaptations like HBO’s “The Last of Us.”
“I can’t think of another time where it has been so competitive to acquire film/TV rights to video game IP, and not just the major ones either,” he said.
Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures, which after a stretch of well-received but commercially disappointing prestige films has mostly gotten out of the movie business (aside from last year’s Oscar-nominated animated feature “Nimona”), is looking to get back in the game by adapting some of their popular video games, several sources told TheWrap.
Annapurna already announced an adaptation of their game “Stray,” where the player is a cat in a futuristic, “Blade Runner”-esque city. And several other games are being adapted into features at the studio, both live-action and animated, TheWrap has learned.
The highest-grossing movie of 2023 after “Barbie” was Universal and Illumination’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which drummed up more than $1 billion at the global box office and spawned a sequel set for release in 2026. Around the same time that Mario was jumping down warp pipes, HBO was airing “The Last of Us,” starring Pedro Pascal, an Emmy-nominated sensation that was based on a more adult-skewing survival video game series.
These titles pack a vital combination of well-known IP and big, theater-worthy storytelling, brought to life by cutting-edge technology from creatives who know and respect the source material. But they’re far from the first attempts to get video games to click on the big screen.”
They won’t ever fully go the way of the western as Marvel Studios needs to make money and they have nothing to make other than superhero movies.
But they just won’t just get massive $200M+ budgets expecting $700M+ WW anymore except the A listers like Batman & Spider-Man.
They’ll probably pivot to doing cheap street level stuff like Blade, Daredevil, and Punisher after Thunderbolts, Captain Falcon, and FF4 flop back to back.
WB will probably just scrap everything and do a Batfamily cinematic universe or something.