5 Bestselling Video Games That Have a Great Movie or TV Series Adaptation
Video game adaptations have been the bane of the movie industry for many years, but there have always been some phenomenal adaptations — and here’s our top-5.
By the time something good started to come out of video game adaptation attempts, the general audience was already all too tired of the pathetic results they’d been seeing before.
But sometimes, all you need is an outstanding lead actor, a phenomenally over-blown budget, and a dream to make a masterpiece. Or not?
5. Prince of Persia
What happens if you make a puzzle-solving, sword-fighting, and action-packed platformer game into a movie and hire an A-lister like Jake Gyllenhaal to portray the main character?
You get a great semi-historical action movie that captures the atmosphere of the original game and passes as a hidden gem in our books.
4. The Witcher
Strictly speaking, The Witcher series from Netflix is not exactly a video game adaptation as it leans more toward the original Andrzej Sapkowski’s books (and even more — into the showrunner’s weird vision). But as The Witcher’s lead actor Henry Cavill is an earnest fan of the video games, he’s doing all he can to live up to them.
3. Tomb Raider
Tomb Raider can boast what no other video game adaptation can: its protagonist, a smart and fearless archeologist Lara Croft, was played by none other than Angelina Jolie! The movie series captured the thrill of adventure and the everlasting sense of danger and risk incredibly well, and the adaptation turned out great.
2. Resident Evil
Back in the day, this game invented the combination of horror and survival and turned the gaming industry upside down, so it was only fair that it got its own movie series with a great lead performer. This is exactly what happened: Milla Jovovich masterfully portrayed Alice and took the horror of the game to the big screens.
It was almost too cruel to turn one of the most moving and painful video game stories into a full-blown TV series and not warn the unsuspecting viewers what they were signing up for, but oh well. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey portrayed the original game’s characters beautifully… And broke one too many hearts as a result.
