10 Biggest Video Game Movie Flops

As Alicia Vikander steps into Angelina Jolie’s shoes for the Tomb Raider reboot and Dwayne Johnson prepares to shoot Rampage, the number of video game adaptations going before the cameras shows no sign of diminishing any time soon.

This is somewhat mystifying because whether we are talking about games based around martial arts or sword and sorcery, the movie versions are always reliably awful. Loud, incoherent and loaded with enough digital effects to qualify as an animated feature, your typical video game movie won’t cause Martin Scorsese to break a sweat during Oscar season.

Then again, brands like Resident Evil have a ready-made international fan base made up of Hollywood’s most prized demographic – young males – and the rewards are more than ample if you can pull it off. With six films in fifteen years, Resident Evil is Hollywood’s longest running gaming franchise with nearly a billion dollars in box office receipts, and to hell with the critics.

Bringing a popular game to the big screen isn’t a licence to print money, however – the last two decades have seen more than their fair share of clinkers and stinkers that between them didn’t make a dime. Despite mammoth budgets, A-list talent and the best production design money can buy, these movies failed to find their audience.

Budget: $35 million

US Box Office: $22,467,450

Hitman: Agent 47 is a reboot of Xavier Gens’s Hitman, the 2007 movie that starred Timothy Olyphant as a bald gun-for-hire on the run from the Russian military. It was based on a video game series developed by IO Interactive, so you had to lower your expectations in order to have a good time.

Clearly uninterested in making a better movie, 20th Century Fox brought in Skip Woods, who also wrote A Good Day To Die Hard, to work on the script. They must’ve told him to target the comic book fans, too, because our genetically engineered hero (played by Homeland’s Rupert Friend) moves just like a superhero, taking out his adversaries with bombs, helicopters and some astonishingly athletic gunplay and….well, let’s not get bogged down in plot.

What The Critics said: “Bears nothing but a passing resemblance to the game that inspired it, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone as it’s all just a cash grab anyway.” (Austin Chronicle)