Is a new cinema coming?

Video games and cinemas are getting closer and closer. With an evolution that promises great successes to come

May 2008: it was released in cinemas, quietly and without arousing suspicion, Iron Manwith a revived Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, the iron man.
Eleven years and 23 films later, the Marvel Cinematic Universe closed its first saga, marking the pinnacle of cinecomics.
From 2019 to today, four years have passed, in which the movies based on comicsmostly Marvel or DC, have seen a considerable decline.
The golden age seems to be over, and which franchise could take over the hearts of children, nerds and young adults?

The Last of Us, Super Mario Bros, Tetris: the beginning of a new era?

In these first months of 2023, a fair number of productions based on videogames.
A coincidence? Maybe, or maybe not, especially considering their success and the great appreciation of the general public.
The Last of Us, the HBO series based on the dystopian RPG, has been celebrated as one of the best series in recent years; the movie of Super Mario Brosthe very Italian Nintendo plumber who eats mushrooms and jumps on turtles, grossed around 300 million dollars in the first weekend of screenings (first in the category rankings); Tetristhe Apple TV movie about one of the most iconic console games in history, turned out to be a spy story of some substance.

From Super Mario to Super Mario: the history of videogames on the big screen

Scrolling through the chronology of films based on video games, we arrive at 1993.
In fact, exactly thirty years ago, the film recognized as forerunner of the “cinegames”the first to reproduce pixels with real actors: it happens to be the Super Mario Bros. by Bob Hoskins. Not an incredible film, indeed, but still a fetish for fans of the genre.
Already in the eighties, in reality, we had entered the videogame world with the original Tron (1982), which lowered the protagonist inside a computer. Gaming-themed films and the like have existed since PCs and consoles were born, but without ever having broken through the dividing wall between enthusiasts and the general public.
Some films have come very close to it: above all, in the last twenty years, i two Tomb Raider films with Angelina Jolie and the Resident Evil saga with Milla Jovovich. Even in these two cases, the coincidences: both have two heroines as protagonists; tomb Raider already boasts a reboot with sequels on the way, Resident Evil is the longest running saga in the industry with nine (9!) movies.

From first steps to Ready Player One and Tetris

All the other productions between the 1990s and the 1910s of the third millennium remain in the cinematheques of enthusiasts. As terrible as they are iconic are the Mortal Kombat of 1995, directed by Paul WS Anderson (not surprisingly, director of most of Resident Evil) and the Street Fighter of 1994 with Jean-Claude Van Damme. He tried it in the 2000s too Tekkenbut without leaving any marks
At least until the two-year period 2018/2019, these were haggard and clumsy attempts: we could cite random titles such as Alone in the dark (2005) and Doom (2005, When The Rock Had Hair), Max Payne (2008 with Mark Wahlberg), Assassin’s Creed (2016, Michael Fassbender actor and producer), all CGI films by Final Fantasythe two HitmanThe Prince of Persia by Jake Gyllenhaal. A considerable series of guilty pleasures, which have not, however, found a suitable reading key for cinema.

Looking back at past films, it is plausible to assume that the breakthrough took place in 2018: came out in the spring Ready Player Oneby Steven Spielberg.
Based not on a video game but on the novel by Ernest Cline, the film is in fact a gamingprobable forerunner of the world to come in ‘augmented reality’.
Very successful and cult full of pop references, it paved the way for Detective Pikachuwhose original story catapults into the world of Pokémon and ai two Sonic movies.

So will the next films tell us whether or not it will be the new cinematic trend for the next decade?
The basin from which to draw is boundless: the already existing productions of will certainly need to be monitored Gran Turismo, Pokémon: Detective Pikachu 2the saga of Metal Gear Solid (one of the most famous and interesting in the gaming world), Bioshock (whose exorbitant production drove filming outside the US to save taxes), Splinter Cell (the gaming spy already voiced by Luca Ward: the same is expected in the film).
Among these, the definitive crack and the answer to our question could be hidden: the combination of video games and cinematoday it is possible.

Damian Martin