When Nintendo announced via Twitter/X that Shigeru Miyamoto had been working for years on a live-action The Legend of Zelda movie with the producer Avi Arad, I immediately felt a little queasy. Not because I'd just browsed Arad's production credits, which really do run the gamut, but because like most adults who love video games, I grew up in the era of game movies so unbelievably dreadful that I still sometimes think angry thoughts about them when I'm trying to get to sleep. It was the era of Jean-Claude Van Damme in Street Fighter, of the fascinatingly terrible 1993 Super Mario cyberpunk nightmare starring Bob Hoskins, of Uwe Boll. Like a kicked dog, I am instinctively fearful. The Zelda series has produced several of the most important, acclaimed games of all time, centred on their mute protagonist, Link, and the various eternally retold and remixed myths of the Kingdom of Hyrule and its royal family (that's Zelda).

The Super Mario Bros. Movie hit theaters last week and broke records with the release raking in just over $146 million domestically. As Deadline says, that makes it the highest grossing opening weekend for any video game-based movie, knocking Sonic The Hedgehog 2, which previously held the record with $141 million, off the top spot. Mario has been a hit the world over, with global takings already more than $377, making it the biggest opening of the year so far. Illumination and Universal's The Super Mario Bros. Movie bring the beloved Nintendo game to the big screen. The story follows Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day), two failing plumbers from Brooklyn as they face Jack Black's Bowser after finding themselves somehow transported to the Mushroom Kingdom.

Breaking news: the internet is in uproar over something impossibly trivial. Yesterday Universal launched its trailer for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a first glimpse at the new big-screen rendering of Nintendo's beloved leak-fixer. For most of the trailer's two-and-a-bit minute run time, fans were happy enough: there was some cutesy CGI, familiar characters were present and correct, there was some gentle PG-rated attempts at humour. But then Mario opened his gob and out came Chris Pratt's voice. The response was immediate and furious.

The humble video game movie tends to get it from all sides. Critics turn up their noses and gaming nerds are often equally hard to please, albeit on very different points of principle. Kids are perhaps the most forgiving demographic for the video game film, which is why the belated Sonic the Hedgehog film franchise has done well to squarely target them. It gets the job done, perhaps a little too thoroughly at more than two hours in length. Many of the best video game adaptations succeed by making it all a bit of a joke.

Sonic has done it again. With a $71 million debut at the domestic box office, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has set a new record for the US film debut of a video game adaptation, beating out the previous high watermark set by its predecessor in 2020. The first movie in what now Paramount plans to expand into a cinematic universe made $57 million during its opening weekend. Before the pandemic shut down theaters throughout the US and other parts of the world, the first Sonic film went on to gross $319 million globally. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is currently on track to beat those earnings having grossed approximately $141 million globally.

Thanks to some extremely advanced artificial intelligence code we won't attempt to explain here, Guy is the only NPC (non-playable character) in Free City who is able to think and feel things for himself. As a result, he starts to become bored with his everyday life.

What makes a good video game movie? Is there even such a thing? The curse of the video game movie has long been documented, and the stigma that it's impossible to make a good one regardless of how much money you throw at it or who plays the lead has dogged the genre for years. Video games are more lucrative than Hollywood films overall, yet video game adaptations still struggle to be taken seriously by studio executives, who often misunderstand what makes the source material so popular to begin with. The anatomy of what makes a game-to-film adaptation tick is particularly relevant now with the release of Detective Pikachu, an adaptation of one of the franchise's lesser-known properties, a spinoff crime-solving game by the same name.

Things are moving forward for video game focused action-comedy Free Guy. The movie, which stars Deadpool favorite Ryan Reynolds, has just signed Killing Eve's Jodie Comer, Get Out's Lil Rel and Stranger Things' Joe Keery in supporting roles. Free Guy -- set to begin shooting in April -- tells the story of a background character (Reynolds) who realizes he's living in a video game, and with the help of an avatar (Comer), must stop the game's developers from shutting down his world. Shawn Levy is attached to direct, which means he'll be stepping away from Uncharted, the long-awaited live action adaptation of the game. The movie, which is loosely based on Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, has been in the works for some time, with a multiple writers and directors coming and going.

No other film genre boasts such an unimpeachable reputation for dreadfulness as the video game adaptation. Some, such as this year's Tomb Raider film and the zombie-themed Resident Evil efforts, almost achieve mediocrity. Others are so fascinatingly terrible that they have become Hollywood legend – for instance, the baffling interpretation of Super Mario Bros proffered by edgy British directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton in 1993, in which Nintendo's bright, joyful Mushroom Kingdom was reimagined as a futuristic dystopia called Dinohattan, where everyone was dressed in fishnets and black leather trenchcoats. A quarter of a century later, it is still impossible to understand why anyone thought that was a good idea. The ever-expanding Marvel cinematic universe is ample proof that films can do an excellent job of exploring geek culture and fleshing out the paper-thin characters that dominate it; Black Panther has just become the fifth highest-grossing movie ever at the US box office.

When director Justin Kurzel re-teamed with cinematographer Adam Arkapaw and Oscar-caliber actors Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard for Assassin's Creed after working together on the critically-acclaimed Macbeth, we thought we might have our first great video game movie adaptation at last. Early reviews are now rolling in for the film, which opens tomorrow nationwide, and they aren't pretty. The film currently sits at a 20% at Rotten Tomatoes with only 6 out of 23 reviews being positive. Yes, film reviews can tick up and down, but it's extremely unlikely that a movie starting out this low will ever make its way up to "fresh." And yes, Rotten Tomatoes is often flawed, but it's not usually wildly off the mark.