Film — Noozify Original — September 23, 2026

Video Game Movies, From Franchise Killers to Franchise Saviors

By Adam Canissario

Watch the story in half a minute

At one point, Sega's management told the head of Sonic Team to kill Sonic the Hedgehog. "During the worst times, I was told by the higher-ups that we should cancel the entire franchise," Takashi Iizuka said in an interview with One More Game, reported by VGC on September 22nd. He fought to keep the series alive, but what actually saved it was a movie. The 2020 live-action Sonic the Hedgehog, he said, "definitely changed the course of this franchise."

That sentence would have sounded absurd for most of the last 30 years. The traffic between games and Hollywood used to run one way. A hit game became a film, and the film embarrassed the game. The 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie became shorthand for the whole genre, and even the six Milla Jovovich Resident Evil films, which made money for 15 years, never earned better than 39 percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Before 2019, the highest-grossing film ever based on a video game was Warcraft, at $439 million worldwide.

The numbers since then belong to a different business. The Super Mario Bros. Movie took $1.36 billion in 2023. A Minecraft Movie made $960 million in 2025, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie passed $1 billion this year. The three Sonic films have climbed with each release, with the third reaching $492 million.

The more important change is what these adaptations now do for the games themselves. When Amazon released its Fallout series in April 2024, sales of Fallout 4, a game that was nine years old, rose more than 7,500 percent in a week and made it Europe's best-selling game. The games were heavily discounted to mark the show's arrival, but three other Fallout games also landed in the top ten. HBO's The Last of Us did something similar a year earlier. In the week after its premiere, UK physical sales of the PS5 game jumped 238 percent and the older PS4 version 322 percent.

A film or series used to be something a game company licensed to earn a fee. It is now marketing that pays for itself, and in Sonic's case, a reason to keep making games at all.

September has shown how far that logic has spread. Zach Cregger's Resident Evil reached 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the best-reviewed video game movie in the site's history, ahead of the previous record-holder, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, at 86 percent. It then opened to a franchise-record $108.3 million worldwide without using a single one of the games' famous characters.

Days before that, Sega announced a deal with Netflix to turn more of its catalog into film and television, including a Crazy Taxi movie, an animated Sonic series, and a film based on Stranger Than Heaven, with Streets of Rage, Comix Zone, and Space Channel 5 also in development. The company that once wanted to cancel Sonic is now building a pipeline modeled on what the Sonic films did.

The producer behind Resident Evil is placing even larger bets. Roy Lee, who also produced A Minecraft Movie and Cregger's Barbarian and Weapons, has around 20 film and television projects based on games in development or production, according to a Wall Street Journal profile summarized by VGC. The list reportedly includes God of War, Battlefield, and a new Silent Hill. Nintendo, which kept Hollywood at arm's length for 30 years after 1993, is following its two Mario hits with a live-action Zelda film, which it promoted alongside the series' 40th anniversary on September 8th.

None of this means the old curse has lifted. Return to Silent Hill, released in January with no involvement from Lee, scored 18 percent with critics and 28 percent with audiences. The films that work tend to share a few traits. They are made by people who played the games, they cast for charm rather than resemblance, and they treat the source as a feeling to recreate rather than a plot to transcribe. Cregger's Resident Evil dropped every character fans knew and kept the dread. The Sonic films kept the character and built a buddy comedy around him.

There is also a simple reason the audience finally showed up. The children who played Sonic on a Genesis in 1991 are now parents, and a film about the characters of their childhood is one of the few things a family of four agrees to see together. Studios have noticed that these franchises come with decades of built-in affection and a second product, the game, to sell afterward.

That second product is the real shift in power. For three decades, a game company licensed its characters to Hollywood and hoped the result would not do lasting damage. Now the adaptation can decide whether the game has a future. Iizuka spent years arguing inside Sega that Sonic deserved another chance. In the end, a movie made the case for him.