In the past three decades Hollywood has recognized the appeal of adapting popular video games to film. They provide a ready-made audience of fans who will most likely see them, and some have become cult classics. These videogame movies are memorable because at some point in time, they’ll be broadcast television for all the world to see. Usually the adaptation is a fun romp in the director’s part in translating pixels to a more realistic product. More often than not, the video game’s appeal is missed in the translation and critics and fans are quick to point out what’s missing in the film. In this look at the worst of what cinema had to offer, maybe they are gems after all:
As any fan and they will say that Super Mario Bros (1993) was mostly disliked even though it had achieved a cult following. This movie starred Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi. Turning the bad guys into gangsters was appropriate in what would otherwise be a fantasy film set in an alternate Earth world. To entirely base the movie on the mythology established in the Mario games would have been disastrous, especially in a decade when digital special effects was in its infancy.
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