The Super Mario Bros. Moviejust enjoyed the biggest opening for an animated movie in history, hot on the heels ofThe Last of Usdominating TV ratings over onHBO. Despite the fact that video game aficionados cried foul when it was suggested that either of these properties represented the death of the video game adaptation curse, people are drawing all sorts of correlations between the two. Their success is video games “just getting started”.
That’s how The Game Awards described the success of the pair. “Video games are just getting started”. What, please, does that mean? Weren’t they just getting started withCyberpunk Edgerunners? OrArcane?Sonic?Detective Pikachu?Castlevania? And even then, why does it matter for video games at large? Don’t we frequently like to brag about gaming out-earning movies and television (so long as you include mobile, which for the purposes of this argument alone now counts as real gaming)? Is this too many question marks for a single paragraph?
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Gaming has always wanted to be something else. Cinema has a built-in sense of prestige that you only get from dominating the cultural conversation for a century, and gaming’s embrace of narrative has seen it mimic cinema further. It so desperately wants approval from film as an art form that it sees box office success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie as an endorsement of gaming as a whole.
It has the same tone as bragging that The Game Awards gets more viewers than the Oscars. The next day, the whole world is talking about the Oscars because they have immense cultural power. The only discussion The Game Awards gets is the adverts shown during it, and even then that’s only by gaming fans rather than the whole world. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that The Game Awards has such a superficial view of Mario’s box office gross though, when it skips over half of its own awards and mocks the winner of one of its most prestigious categories for daring to take it seriously in his award speech.
There’s also the fact that a high gross doesn’t necessarily spell quality. The previous highest grossing animated opening belonged to Frozen 2, which is not placed in the legendary company of the original, while the highest grossing video game movie is Warcraft. Rampage is third on the list. Meanwhile, all anybody could talk about during The Last of Us was all the Emmys it would sweep - Succession might have something to say about that.
Look, I liked The Super Mario Bros. Movie. In the great debate of critics versus fans, I was one of the critics who scored it above the average. My review came in ‘Fresh’. It was an enjoyable journey through typical Mario imagery with Illumination’s typical touches. Likewise, I thought The Last of Us was a fantastic show, even if it spent a little too much time on shot for shot recreations. I don’t begrudge either their success, I just wish video games weren’t so embarrassingly hungry to be anything they’re not.
Two video game adaptations doing well at the same time is just that. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s fine to be excited if a game you love has a successful adaptation that deepens your connection with it, but you’re able to’t just be excited because it’s A Video Game. If we want society to think video games aren’t just for children, we have to stop being so immature about them.
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