Videogame Movies Are Finally Getting Halfway Decent

Movies based on videogames have a notoriously bad track record, but fantasy author Erin Lindsey says that the recent Tomb Raider reboot, while hardly original, was surprisingly well done. "They do the work of showing why Lara is capable of what she's capable of, and being believable in what she's not capable of," Lindsey says in Episode 415 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "It was done on a very human scale, and it was credibly acted, and they put in the work with the characters." Other recent videogame movies such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Detective Pikachu, and Rampage have connected with audiences and even earned respectable, though hardly stellar, reviews. Videogame journalist Blake J. Harris hopes that these successes will change the way people look at videogame movies. "A lot of people always have this caveat, like when Rampage made almost half a billion dollars, and people were like, 'Oh, well that one wasn't really a videogame movie,'" he says.