The 10 Most Disappointing Video Game Movies, Ranked

Who needs to play video games when you can watch them acted out instead? This logic seems counterintuitive, but the formula for adapting interactive entertainment has begun to yield positive results. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2snatched a box office victory, and people who have never picked up a controller are anxiously awaiting the second season of Fallout.

However, there is a long and growing list of video game adaptations that fail to capture a fraction of their built-in audiences, squandering amazing potential for an epic movie. The following movies are some of the best examples of what not to do, each making audiences yearn for the ‘game over’ screen long before it came. These are the ten most disappointing video game adaptations, ranked by how much they let their fan base down.

10

‘Alone in the Dark’ (2005)

Before Resident Evil popularized the survival-horror genre of video games, Alone in the Darkcreated the template to follow. The 1992 PC game was a creepy horror story that had the player take control of a private investigator as he explored a haunted house in the 1920s. The Alone in the Dark movie has Christian Slater and Tara Reid fighting computer-generated monsters that are boldly called Xenos.

Director Uwe Boll is not only responsible for Alone in the Dark, but also for other video game misfires such as BloodRayne, House of the Dead, and the notorious Postal. Expectations weren’t necessarily high for any of those titles to be disappointing, but Alone in the Dark had a lot of promise to offer as a film. Instead of a gothic horror movie, Alone in the Dark landed as a forgettable action flick that didn’t resemble the game it was “based” on.

9

‘Hitman’ (2007)

The Hitman game series encourages replay value by giving the player multiple ways to creatively kill their target, but one watch will be enough for the film version. Hitman stars Timothy Olyphant as Agent 47, a hitman who was trained from an early age to be one of many assassins working for a secret organization. When 47 is betrayed by his own organization, he must uncover the reason for the deception while avoiding his own assassination.

Olyphant delivers a performance that conveys intelligence and menace, but otherwise, Hitman is a hard movie to stay engaged with. The plot is overly dense and attempts to be a globe-trotting spy movie that doesn’t quite fit the simple nature of the games. It would be interesting to see what a Hitman movie could have looked like if The Bourne Identity had not been a massive hit a few years prior.

8

‘Max Payne’ (2008)

Mark Wahlberg brought a cult-favorite video game antihero to life with the action thriller Max Payne. Wahlberg plays the titular Max Payne, a New York City police detective still overcome with grief over the death of his wife and daughter. As Max’s professional career falls apart, he discovers a lead that might uncover the truth about the murder of his family.

The first few Max Payne games heavily took inspiration from gritty noir crime movies, so it’s puzzling to see that spirit not make its way into a film adaptation. Max Payne exists in a heightened world not far off from Sin City, but the movie includes a supernatural element that confuses an already muddled plot, although admittedly it’s a visual highlight. Max Payne actually didn’t lose 20th Century Fox money, and was a minor hit, but the studio was wise not to press their luck with a sequel.

7

‘Doom’ (2005)

The seminal first-person shooter that changed the landscape of video games received the big screen treatment in the action sci-fi horror hybrid Doom. Karl Urban and Dwayne Johnson are a part of a team of Marines sent to investigate a Mars research facility that has become unresponsive. Because the movie is called Doom, and not Sorry, We Were Busy and Forgot To Call, they find a group of monsters that require immediate killing.

A film version of Doom would have been every pre-teen’s dream in the ’90s, but when the movie was finally released in 2005, the result was a bit of a let-down. Urban and Johnson are bright spots, but the movie drags for long stretches without that time being taken to build tension or meaningfully move the plot forward. Changing the story to mutant experiments instead of demons from hell left many fans of the series disappointed, and the swap didn’t enhance the movie, ultimately feeling like unnecessary tinkering.

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6

‘Mortal Kombat: Annihilation’ (1997)

The ultra-violent arcade game Mortal Kombat was fortunate enough to have a well-received movie that understood, not only how to adapt the source material, but in a way that worked with a PG-13 rating. That’s what makes it all the more disappointing that the follow-up, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, dropped the ball on the series in such a profound way.

The first Mortal Kombat wasn’t going to win any awards, but it was a fun action movie that did a solid job of fleshing out the characters from the game. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, on the other hand, feels like a book report that was written the night before. The quality of visuals dropped drastically from one movie to the next, with the sequel looking more in line with a television production. Most egregious was the early death of Johnny Cage (Chris Conrad), a fan favorite character who, in retrospect, seemed mercy-killed from the adventure.

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5

‘Borderlands’ (2024)

When Borderlands released in 2024, it made headlines for all the wrong reasons. The film follows Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a space bounty hunter who is lured into taking a job on her home planet of Pandora. Quickly upon her return to the dangerous wasteland of Pandora, she finds that all is not what it seems, forming a shaky alliance with mercenary Roland (Kevin Hart) and the dangerous child Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt).

The Borderlands game series is known for constant action and a sense of humor that separates it from other loot shooters in the same space. Critics ripped into Borderlands in a way that implied the movie had personally caused them harm, and while it’s not an affront to cinema, the action comedy is extremely disjointed. Borderlands falls flat in a way that a high-energy movie like this cannot afford to, and the troubled and delayed production is evident in the final product.

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4

‘Double Dragon’ (1994)

The Double Dragon arcade game was designed to eat quarters, and the Double Dragon movie was designed to eat your time. The film tells the story of Billy (Scott Wolf) and Jimmy Lee (Mark Dacascos), two brothers trying to hustle their way by fighting in a destroyed, futuristic version of Los Angeles now known as New Angeles. The duo is tasked with protecting their half of a powerful medallion from a slick crime boss named Koga Shuko (Robert Patrick) in order to prevent him from amassing unstoppable power.

Double Dragon was the film that introduced many children in the 90s to the concept that a movie could be bad. If viewed as a comedy, Double Dragon is almost a fully functional parody of Saturday Morning cartoons, and as anything else, it doesn’t work. To its credit, Double Dragon at least takes a creative swing on a brightly imagined dystopic future, even if the final product comes up short.

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3

‘Assassin’s Creed’ (2016)

An incredibly popular modern video game franchise strived to find the same success in theaters with Assassin’s Creed. Michael Fassbender stars as Cal Lynch, a man who has his death row execution staged in order to take part in clandestine experiments within a secret lab. It’s there that Cal learns of a long-standing conflict between the Templars and a group called the Assassins, the latter of which Cal has direct familial bonds with.

Assassin’s Creed boasts a very talented cast, and yet it seems like they were all told not to express emotion. Because we spend the majority of our time with one character, but then experience action scenes through the eyes of his ancestor, the emotional attachment is stripped from those chunks of the film that were intended to have high stakes. The movie’s ratio of future and past leaned in the direction of the present day, and for an Assassin’s Creed film to work, it needs to predominantly focus on the past, much like the games do.

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2

‘Street Fighter’ (1994)

Fans of Street Fighter can look forward to a new movie in 2026 to hopefully wash away the memory of the 1994 version. The movie follows a group of international heroes led by Colonel William Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme) as they fight to defeat the evil General M. Bison (Raul Julia) from achieving world domination. The game features many characters to choose from, and the adaptation did its best to jam in as many as possible to fight on paved roads and other such streets.

Street Fighter definitely qualifies as one of the “so bad it’s good” movies, where any scene is campy brilliance that wasn’t intended to be. That doesn’t soothe the pain of the many fans who spent calendar months perfecting their skills at the game, and were fully prepared for Street Fighter to be their favorite movie. A bright spot in the action movie is Julia’s inspired performance as M. Bison, his last on-screen role before a stroke ended his life.

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1

‘Super Mario Bros.’ (1993)

If there was one movie that had the potential to ruin any future video game movies being made, it was Super Mario Bros. The live-action adaptation tells the story of Mario (Bob Hoskins) and his brother Luigi (John Leguizamo) as they try to rescue Princess Daisy (Samantha Mathis) from King Koopa (Dennis Hopper). To accomplish this task, Mario and Luigi will travel to an alternate world where dinosaurs have evolved into humanoid creatures.

Super Mario Bros. is a largely incoherent film that is the result of a prolonged and messy production that left virtually everyone involved unhappy. Most of the blame can fall on a misguided effort to make the story of plumbers kicking winged turtles a gritty techno sci-fi adventure. Mario was the face of video games in the 90s, and there was nothing to prepare the soon-to-be-confused children who watched the movie, patiently waiting for anything on the screen to look like the game they loved.