Universals The Super Mario Bros. Movie set a new baseline for Hollywood productions adapted from video game IP when it became a billion-dollar global success after releasing in April.
That success wasnt confined to Universal, as IP holder and producer Nintendo followed that streak with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, its highly anticipated follow-up to 2017s Breath of the Wild, which helped cement Nintendo Switch as a household item.Tears of the Kingdom managed to sell 10 million copies in its first three days amid unanimous acclaim.
These two events are related. Not just because Mario and Zelda are two of Nintendos most pivotal franchises but because gaming is an undeniable fixture of mainstream culture.
The franchise model has served Hollywood extremely well over the past two decades as an effective way to build up attention, harness it and then reactivate it with additional releases. The alternative is to build a new brand from the ground up in a digital environment where its increasingly difficult and expensive to make new IP stand out.
Still, some of the biggest franchises are showing their age. Its time to refresh, and that refresh must be able to resonate with new generations of moviegoers.
Gaming, enter stage left.
In terms of the type ofcontent alone, video games represent the biggest sector of entertainment, as they are by some calculations bigger than film and recorded musiccombined. The most popular games are cultural artifacts that come with massive built-in audiences.
Gamers spend hours upon hours inside any given games internal universe, developing empathy for its characters and passion for the myriad stories that can be told, per the games mechanics. For many titles, this built-in audience engagement often stretches beyond the core software into other digital town squares like Discord servers and subreddits on Reddit.
The game-to-movie trend certainly isnt a brand-new aspect of the film industry. Capcoms Resident Evil had a long-running film series at Sony Pictures, which also made two films based on the popular Angry Birds mobile game.
But far more recent adaptations of gaming IP represent a new floor of success for such films, as half of the 10 most successful video game films were released within the last five years.
That said, audience journeys are not limited to big-screen events. Januarys The Last of Us, based on the critically acclaimed PlayStation exclusive from Sony Interactive Entertainment, was a crucial hit for HBO, joining the ranks of House of the Dragon as a front-facing original series meant to attract more viewers to the cabler, as well as subscribers to Max, HBOs relaunched streaming home. In July, Peacock will also dip its toes into PlayStation IP with Twisted Metal, a streaming series adaptation of the post-apocalyptic automobile mayhem series of video games.
Film adaptations certainly arent slowing down, though. According to a list from IGN, lots of gaming IP awaits the cinema in various stages of production and development, with Sonys Gran Turismo hitting theaters next in August.
Beyond the AAA gaming titles, there are other, less obvious game-related opportunities. Have you played Adopt Me! within Roblox? Probably not, yet its an in-game experience that has produced more than 60 billion visits since its inception five years ago. From the perspective of attention is value, imagine the amount of engagement this IP has amassed in a short period of time.
A casual pet-adoption game might not carry the deepest story, but thats not a bad thing. Adopt Me! is the kind of gaming experience that creates an opportunity for Hollywood entities to partner with a platform like Roblox and license multiple experiences within it that already bare brand recognition with wide swaths of consumers.
Games represent a new source of storytelling for Hollywood, but the buck shouldnt stop there. If they themselves have become their own platforms for games within games, the major studios and streamers shouldnt solely adapt them into one-off projects or series but rather wholly new multimedia experiences that extend the narrative past storytelling itself.
Martin Berg is the CEO of DX, a cinema and event management platform based in Norway.