The 15 Worst Video Game Movies Of All Time

There's only one thing more frustrating than playing a video game and dying to the same boss over and over again – watching someone die to the same boss over and over again by repeating the same mistakes and refusing to learn from them. Any video game fan can empathize with this, having either endured a bad couch co-op session or, more metaphorically speaking, witnessed decades of Hollywood's failed video game adaptations.

From distorted lore and thematic ideas to poor casting, direction, and writing, studios have stumbled over the same mistakes time and time again on their quest to cash in on an $180 billion industry. Though the dawn seems to be approaching — with Amazon Prime Video's "Fallout" and HBO's "The Last of Us" proving the subgenre is capable of greatness — recent theatrical releases prove the night is far from over.

Credit where credit is due, the 1995 "Mortal Kombat" film is the undisputed champion of video game movies in terms of music. There's also some great effects work and set design, a few iconic moments, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa's scene (and soul) stealing performance as Shang Tsung. But when it comes to story, dialogue, acting, and faithfulness to the source material, "Mortal Kombat" is a brutal slog to an uninspired fatality.

Based on a fighting game so reliant on ridiculous violence that not even its creators could believe anyone would want to make it a movie, it was directed by then-newcomer Paul W.S. Anderson (who bluffed his way through the hiring process by becoming a pseudo-expert on CGI overnight). The film could have actually benefited from the gorey creativity of the arcade hit, though it would've also needed a more compelling plot and few swapped actors to be a worthy contender.

A box office disaster that set the tone for years of video game misfires to come, 1993's live-action "Super Mario Bros." adaptation is as ambitious as it is confoundingly off the mark. In attempting to adapt one of the thinnest video game storylines at the time, the production team tried forcing the colorful world of the Nintendo classic through the dark lens (pipe?) of the most popular genre fare at the moment.

Producer Roland Joffé said of their vision, "This wasn't Snow White and the Seven Dinosaurs. The dino world was dark. We didn't want to hold back," (per The Guardian). Unfortunately, the grit of 1990's "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" film and Tim Burton's "Batman" didn't work so well here, and resulted in an uncomfortably grimey fantasy flick with an unrecognizable cast of characters wearing the lore and names of the game's characters like uncanny skin suits.

All that being said, there are those even among our ranks here at /Film who feel that the film is far more interesting that most remember. It may be even more deserving of a reappraisal in the wake of Illumination's serviceably faithful but almost defiantly bland animated adaptation, though not even the most generous watch could reveal anything more than the guiltiest and least pleasurable of guilty pleasure films.

Before "Mortal Kombat" kicked its way into theaters with a relatively underwhelming cast, another fighting game adaptation did so with an embarrassment of talent — emphasis on the word "embarrassment." Starring action legends Jean-Claude Van Damme and Ming-Na Wen, as well as Shakespearean thespian Raul Julia, 1994's "Street Fighter" has zero excuse for being as forgettable and laborious as it is. The film (written and directed by Steven E. de Souza of "Die Hard" fame) commits to the world of its source material only aesthetically, leaving admittedly ridiculous but potentially fun aspects of the game stranded, gasping for air in a barren wasteland of plodding and predictable storytelling.

Some have been willing to fight that "Street Fighter" is actually good, and we'll concede that Julia is legitimately menacing and captivating as General M. Bison (and de Souza may have gone a bit hard with the dialogue for the "For me, it was Tuesday" scene). But Julia's work only underscores how much talent is wasted on this otherwise improbably boring feature that has nothing to offer fans of the video game or action movies in general. If the Muscles from Brussels himself can't shine in a movie titled "Street Fighter," what's the point?

Like most video game adaptations, Universal Pictures' "Five Nights at Freddy's" film is painfully aware of the series' large fanbase and is too eager to serve them precisely what (they think) they want, and is too scared to anger them to create something entertaining or compelling as a movie. Yes, there are plenty of Easter eggs and nods to the games' almost biblical amount of lore, and the animatronics themselves might as well be copy and pasted from a PC. However, in the absence of interesting characters or a genuinely scary story, this mess of IP iconography is as depressing to behold as a landfill made entirely of Funko Pops.

The surface-level fidelity will gain some purchase among younger fans, and far be it from us to totally dismiss a rare campy horror classic for kids. Adults, on the other hand, will find "Five Nights" feeling as though it were moving in real time, sapping a week's worth of energy from you and leaving you longing for the games' cheap yet slightly energizing jump scares.

There are several bad Tomb Raider movies out there, and some readers would have it that we include all of them on this list. We decided to select just one, and wound up landing on the original Angelina Jolie starrer "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider."

Despite Jolie's best efforts to do right by one of video games' most beloved heroines, the film gives neither actor nor character much to do besides trek through a slow, color-by-numbers plot that confuses incoherent twists with story and loud noises and special effects with action. Stripped of the names "Lara Croft" and "Tomb Raider," it's an unremarkable and barely watchable film you'd only expect to find abandoned in the bargain movie bin of a dollar store.

Still, it's worth noting that "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" is one of very few video game movies and action movies in general that features a woman doing the lion's share of the butt-kicking. For some girls and women who saw the film back in 2001, when the landscape for this sort of heroine-led adventure was even worse, Jolie's Croft remains surprisingly meaningful.

A horror film like "Silent Hill: Revelation" can be saved pretty easily by clearing the relatively low bar of, y'know, being scary. After all, the series has no shortage of terrifying characters and ideas that could be introduced to a moviegoing audience, making the film at least worthy of a few screams — even if it maintains the video game adaptation subgenre's broad disinterest in things like narrative, character, theme, and the other basic aspects of storytelling.

Sadly, the mouthless poster for "Silent Hill: Revelation" is about as chilling as the film gets. What concepts it mines from the games are tossed on screen without the context or style necessary to make them unnerving. It calls to mind the legendary "Silent Hills" playable teaser (known as "P.T."), in which creator Hideo Kojima turned a simple unending hallway into a goldmine of horrifying tension. "Revelation," meanwhile, twists its script inside out and backward to fit in every plot contrivance and gimmick possible, only to find that they fail to manufacture the same experience. That the story meanders its way toward a yawn-inducing sword fight — underpinned entirely by hokey pokey shots meant to sell the feature as a 3D event — is evidence of how much it misunderstands why gamers even bothered to pick up "Silent Hill" in the first place.

Once upon a time, /Film was actually invited to visit the set of "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time." What we found was a production with no shortage of technical majesty — elaborate costuming, practical set design, and impressive stunt work, to name a few of its finer traits. What wouldn't be obvious until the film's release, however, was how little all these grains of brilliance would matter when lost in a sandstorm of narrative banality.

We suppose the writing was more or less on the wall from the point Walt Disney Studios and producer Jerry Bruckheimer were heavily intimating to the trades that "Prince of Persia" was to spiritually succeed "Pirates of the Caribbean" in terms of tone, scale, and (most importantly) financial potential. Given that they only made it one film into the Pirates franchise before devolving into nigh-incomprehensible fantasy dreck, it shouldn't be all that surprising that production found no more favorable waters in "Persia."

Jake Gyllenhaal is the film's controversial star, his miscasting as the titular Prince Dastan going beyond even ethnic inaccuracy. A genuinely brilliant performer, Gyllenhaal is completely wasted on this stale, proto-Star Lord swashbuckler who's too stiff and conventional to inspire emotional investment from the audience. And at the center of an equally uninspiring script, Dastan and the rest can do nothing but be swallowed whole into total genre obscurity.

As far as long-running video game franchises go, Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed actually has a fairly coherent and straightforward storyline. A modern-day assassin with the ability to experience the lives of his ancestors and fellow assassins from centuries past must use this to prevent a conspiracy of corporate cultists from taking over the world. Cut; paste; blockbuster. Even if they didn't want to risk directly adapting the story of Desmond Miles from the games, it's a plotline so fully realized that it wouldn't be too hard to craft an original story that fit soundly within this lore.

Instead, 2016's "Assassin's Creed" film ignores the characters and much of the story from the games, running in the direction of an ostensibly original tale that, again, when stripped of its title and commercial connections to the game series, lacks any kind of meaningful originality whatsoever. Michael Fassbender's new assassin is descended from the long line of uncomplex "bad" boys whose bend toward stoicism yields only grunts and smirks of personality or depth. The entire production seemed desperate to avoid any sort of edge, even cutting an alternate ending that, while not capable of saving the movie, would have at least been a little more interesting than the franchise-begging finale we got.

The best way to warn someone against wasting their time on "Warcraft" is by comparing it to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films — it has all the densely esoteric and impenetrable lore of the former trilogy and all the garish CGI of the latter. And at a full two hours in length, we can't even commend it for being a breezier watch, despite having a script far thinner in terms of story and character. On-screen, there is truly nothing redeeming about this adaptation, even for the biggest fans of the World of Warcraft franchise.

Off-screen, however, it wasn't all doom and gloom for "Warcraft." Thanks to some international motion (especially in China), it did well financially, and was at one point the most successful video game movie of all time based on that metric. It also experienced something of a renaissance when it shot to the top of Netflix's charts in the summer of 2024.

Speaking of renaissances, off the back of the Fast and Furious franchise's successful reinvention post-"Tokyo Drift," Disney probably thought they had an ace up their sleeve in the Need for Speed IP. A simple riff on the criminals driving fast (and-slash-or furious) story with the skin of a beloved video game series should result in nothing but sequels and massive box office returns. Right?

As should be evident from a frustrating amount of the entries on this very list (and many more examples too great in number to all be included here), a studio can't just slap a video game title card on an otherwise dramatically nondescript movie and expect it to resonate with anyone. "Need for Speed" did fine at the box office, but its lack of three-dimensional characters or novel concepts robbed it of any real franchise potential. The only time you could expect to be engaged by "Need for Speed" is if you saw it playing in a DMV waiting area, though even a low-budget driving PSA would be more enthralling.

Honestly, we could make a solid case for filling half of this list with the entirety of the Resident Evil film series. Mostly directed by "Mortal Kombat" helmsman Paul W.S. Anderson, each movie is marred by the same misguided creative choices that plagued his first foray into the video game world — a confused use (or abandonment) of lore; shoddy effects that are barely passable compared to its contemporaries; and, most damning of all in the case of "Resident Evil," a complete lack of engaging performances.

Sadly, there's no Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa here to provide any release from a lineup of disaffected, overly stoic action-hero performances that range from boring to laughable. It also fails to even approximate the atmosphere of the Resident Evil games, the best of which remain grounded in a zombie-slash-haunted house horror tone and only briefly change the dial to the science fiction noise that completely drowns out this film.

Before he took on the role of the Grand Inquisitor in the Disney+ Star Wars series "Obi-Wan Kenobi," Rupert Friend was tasked with leading a reboot of the Hitman film franchise — which, at the point, consisted of a single 2007 movie so terrible it apparently necessitated an immediate overhaul. Unfortunately for Friend and friends, "Hitman: Agent 47" is everything wrong with its predecessor and then some.

Lacking the psychological complexity of Bourne, the cool factor of James Bond, or the choreography of John Wick, the adaptation is immediately outpaced by the dominating action franchises of this era, left with nothing to offer but the pretense of thrill. Technically, all the same things happen in "Agent 47" that happen in every generic bullet-blockbuster, but there's no spirit behind them to connect with. It has all the emotional depth and catharsis one could find scrolling through movie clips on YouTube Shorts for 90 minutes.

Very few movies in the history of film have flopped so hard they practically put the studio that made them out of business — "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" is one of them. In its defense, we debated including it at all on this list, as, in spite of all its many unforgivable flaws, it does have a level of creative ambition that no other movie featured here has. It's as much a cash grab as any video game adaptation, but there were certainly easier ways to make a Final Fantasy film than trying to essentially establish a new medium that transcends animation and live-action.

But other than as a precursor for films like "The Lion King" (2019), "The Spirits Within" is all tech and no craft. It has one of the least emotionally affecting stories of any video game movie, and the star-studded cast (which includes Ming-Na Wen, Donald Sutherland, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Buscemi) is too alienated from their clay-like, action-figure characters to make any of it dramatically convincing. Today, it feels like you're watching a never-ending cutscene.

One of the biggest box office bombs of 2024, "Borderlands" is an inexcusable disaster. It isn't just that it makes all the same cynical missteps as the majority of this list — shallow writing hiding behind IP bells and whistles, perplexing casting choices, and a nauseating use of special effects, to name a few.

What makes "Borderlands" actively upsetting as a film is that it makes all these predictable subgenre mistakes during an era in which most studios and filmmakers are showing how these games should be adapted. Forget "The Last of Us" and "Fallout" taking the video game subgenre to the awards circuit — in what world did we get a decent "Twisted Metal" adaptation before "Borderlands"?

Ten years ago, this would've just been a bad movie that video game fans could point to as an example when discussing how studios misunderstand the medium at large. Now, it's barely a movie worth discussing at all.

"BloodRayne" is the defining work of Uwe Boll (the champion of bad video game adaptations) and one of the most expensive horror movie flops in history. The game franchise it's based on is a bit more obscure than most others on this list — essentially, it follows the adventures of a human-vampire hybrid who fights Nazis and zombies on behalf of a secret supernatural order.

Rather than try to make something of this premise for the feature adaptation, Boll and "American Psycho" scribe Guinevere Turner took the story back in time several centuries to make their adaptation more of a quasi-canonical prequel. To their credit, this strategy actually falls in line with more successful video game movies and TV shows — though, here, the characters and ideas are removed so far from the context that made them popular it's really hard to see it as a video game movie at all.

The "BloodRayne" film is a vague sword and sorcery action-horror film that fumbles what few fights and scares it attempts. It could be argued that it is the quintessential bad video game adaptation, perfectly encapsulating the creative and technical failures that plague the subgenre at large.