The Worst (And Not-So-Bad) Video Game Movies

More often than not, video game movies take something we know, love, and obsess over and transform it into an unrecognizable monster at worst—or a forgettable, underwhelming experience at best. Happy endings in the video game movie genre can be hard to come by.

While all video game movie adaptations miss the mark when translating the spirit of a game to the silver screen, some are better than others. 2006’s Silent Hill wasn’t so bad. Pokémon Detective Pikachu is cute and fun, and doesn’t require extensive knowledge of the Pokémon universe to enjoy. Meanwhile, some video game movies are so bad that they’ve been able to transcend criticism and ridicule over time, like the Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raúl Juliá-led 1994 classic Street Fighter.

In this video, we take you through our top not-so-bad and worst video game movies of all time. Whether you’re a source material purist, a casual movie-goer, or a film critic, we can all still agree that video game movies can sometimes, maybe all the time, be terribly disappointing. Who knows, though: Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will make a great horror movie about Animal Crossing, or a rom-com Dead by Daylight. One can only hope.