The best video game films – ranked by data!

Many a thread is filled with gamers and film enthusiasts arguing about examples of the 'best' video game film adaptations.

It's a tricky area to measure – some choose 'faithfulness to the source material' as their metric, while others enjoy films that bring something new instead of feeling like they're re-watching a cutscene.

Rather than another subjective option, this article weighs up data using the IMDb scores for both the film and its most relevant game.

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Here are our top ten films based on video games, or you can jump to our complete list.

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Resident Evil 6 is a strange beast – it builds on the "less horror, more shooting" formula of RE5 (only with better AI co-op) and so was never going to please all fans.

Giving the game four campaigns may have been a way to try and achieve this, but if this was the aim then it didn't work – it posted one of the lowest IMDb scores for the series.

In comparison, the Resident Evil: Damnation film was more positively received, including "an approval rating of 100% on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes".

A lot of the praise came from the film being "one of the [most] faithful video game adaptations especially thanks to the characters' dynamics", although some critics were put off by needing to know the game in order to enjoy the story.

As such, RE: Damnation highlights the balance needed between meeting fan expectations while at the same time providing something new, both in the games themselves and in the films that try to emulate this experience.

The 2009 mobile game phenomenon that's spawned countless sequels, variations and imitators, Angry Birds has seen over 2 billion downloads across all platforms. For context, that's equivalent to the entire world population in 1927.

It's also been spun off into a myriad of books, comics, cartoon series, songs, and theme park attractions, but it's the two feature-length films that we're interested in here.

Released in 2016 and 2019 respectively, The Angry Birds Movie and The Angry Birds Movie 2 raked in a combined worldwide gross of just over $500M – coincidentally the same figure as the Angry Birds 2 game has now generated in revenue.

A combined $149M of this came from the US box office – only $1M more than the US gross for Sonic The Hedgehog, and $41M shy of the US gross for Sonic The Hedgehog 2. America, it seems, prefers their games to involve freeing animals instead of taking vengeance against them.

With only a small difference in the IMDb scores for the Angry Birds game (an average rating of 6.8) and the films (6.3 for the first film and 6.4 for the second), The Angry Birds Movie and its sequel slot into second and third places in our list of worthy video game adaptations.

It's hard to separate The Need For Speed (NFS to its friends) games from the ongoing box office phenomenon that is The Fast And The Furious (F&F to its family).

Certainly, NFS: Undercover's plot is ripped straight from the first F&F film, and Paul Walker even had an 'additional voices' cameo in Need For Speed: Most Wanted.

But the original 1994 game was a much more straightforward long-racing affair, where you avoid traffic and the police across street and closed circuit tracks.

Released on the 3DO and praised for its realism (thanks partly to its innovative use of full motion video) and audio and video commentaries, this 'First And The Furious' game slotted into pole position with an IMDb gaming score of 7.5.

The Need For Speed film, meanwhile, had to settle for an average score of 6.4 (based on 174K reviews) among criticisms for " its direction, nonsensical story, runtime, and the performances of the supporting cast".

While these complaints didn't hurt the box office – the final worldwide gross was around $203M including $43.6M from the US – you can understand why the fans might have been expecting more from a game that sold over 150 million copies.

Paul W.S. Anderson is a veteran of video game films, including 1994's Mortal Kombat (which was only his second film) and writing all 6 of the live-action Resident Evil films.

Even his retooling of Death Race owes more to the NES game of the same name – itself a remake of an older game – than it does to its source film, Death Race 2000.

But it's 2020's Monster Hunter that makes the top ten, which was (again) written and directed by Anderson and (again) stars his wife, Milla Jovovich.

Based on the prolific Japanese game series, the film is considered a box office bomb – recouping just $44m worldwide compared to a production budget of $66m plus marketing costs – and was poorly received by IMDb critics, with an average score of just 5.2.

The film did OK in the US, securing a gross of $15M, but this wasn't enough to pick up the slack for a film that cost $635K a minute just to make!

While several of the Monster Hunter games series posted outstanding IMDb scores (including Monster Hunter 3 with a score of 9.0, Monster Hunter: Freedom Unite with 8.5, and Monster Hunter World: Iceborne with 8.1), its original 2004 outing on the PS2 only received a lacklustre 6.4.

Still, at least the game ended up selling a million copies for Capcom and paved the way for a franchise that's sold nearly 80 million units across the world.

No other film on this list shows the divide between games and film quite like Warcraft: The Beginning.

Directed by Duncan Jones (director of the much-acclaimed Moon), and based on a script by himself and Charles "Blood Diamond" Leavitt, it was panned in the US but went on to become the world's "highest-grossing film based on a video game" thanks to considerable success in China.

Critics were quick to point out its boggy exposition and clichéd dialogue, with Roger Ebert calling it "easily a contender for the worst movie of the year".

And while 'only' costing $160M to produce, additional spend on distribution, marketing, and promotion meant that the film failed to reach its break-even point of $450-500M.

The final worldwide gross was $439M, including a staggering $46M from its Chinese opening day. In comparison, the total US box office came in at only $47.4M, which despite being the fourth-highest US return in our top ten, wasn't enough to help put such an expensive film back in the black.

But there's another side to the Warcraft film, with Screen Rant evidencing how it could still be a long-term financial success, and articles such as Cult Of Whatever arguing that the film was too much of an adaptation of the original games.

And for hardcore fans of the series the film's faithfulness to the source material delivers and then some.

But despite being the most popular MMORPG subscription game ever, Warcraft wasn't able to shift this popularity across to the passive entertainment media as a film, and so sits in sixth place on our top ten list.

While 2005's Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is widely recognised as being a much stronger film than its (unrelated) predecessor, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is notable for several other reasons.

It was the first photorealistic computer-animated feature film ever made, and this ambition came with high costs. The final production price tag was around $137M, and with a disappointing global return of just $85M – including $32M from the US box office – its lack of return failure led to the demise of Square Pictures.

The visuals were literally gorgeous – the lead female character infamously became the first fictional woman to ever make Maxim's 'sexiest women' list in 2001 – but the story and dialogue were lacklustre, and the film only earned a 6.4 across 83K IMDb reviews.

Despite being a financial flop and not being in any way related to any of the 15 numbered games, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within still deserves a spot in the top ten.

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson – would any film list be complete without him? But what's less well-known is his long-standing history of appearing in computer games.

Sure there's the behemoth WWE wrestling series to namecheck, but there's also 2006's SpyHunter: Nowhere To Run (ironically created as a video game tie-in for film that never got made) as well as a role reprisal from his feature film breakout for The Scorpion King: Rise of the Akkadian.

But while his 2005 film adaptation of Doom could never live up to the grandiose of the 1993 id Software game, Rampage did very well at the box office in 2018 and returned $428M worldwide based on a production budget of £140M.

A Rock-sized $101M of this came from the US box office, making it the third-highest domestic grossing film on our list.

Originally an arcade game before being ported to a range of home consoles, Rampage's gameplay is simple. Play as one of three mutated monsters and cause as much destruction as you can before the army finally takes you down.

Sadly this didn't mean that we got to see Dwayne Johnson in a gorilla suit hanging off a skyscraper (pun intended) and eating helicopters, but we did get to see him surf a helicopter down one, which was almost as good.

Aside from the action, the film was praised for its humour and old-school easter eggs, but lacked enough fun to make it a must-see – reflected in its IMDb score of 6.1.

Rampage went on to create a franchise, and as for The Rock? His love of video games clearly remains, with Jumanji and its sequel heavily inspired by computer lore, and a rumour that his next film will also be a video game adaptation.

Another import from the arcades, 1996's Dead Or Alive, was later ported to the Sega Saturn and Playstation and never looked back.

Sequels expanded out onto PCs and Xboxes, with the latest incarnation (Dead Or Alive 6) paying homage to its button-mashing roots with a limited arcade machine release in Japan.

The DOA film, meanwhile, was only loosely based on game series, and some of the characters barely resemble their pixelated namesakes.

Produced by the ubiquitous Paul W.S. Anderson and starring My Name Is Earl's Jaime Pressly and actress-turned-singer Holly Valance, the film bombed with a $7.5M worldwide theatrical gross – including a mere $480.8K from the US box office – against a production budget of $30M.

While the IMDb scores for both the game (6.3) and the film (4.8) were close, you're better off skipping this adaptation entirely and streaming the 1994 Street Fighter film instead.

If this sound still haunts your dreams, then you know you're a true Sonic fan.

Developed to show off the speed capabilities of the Sega Megadrive, the original Sonic The Hedgehog was 1991's best-selling video game and went on to sell more than 14 million units worldwide.

Its numerous sequels have varied in quality, with 2017's Sonic Mania aiming to capture the original's 16-bit charm.

The original game cemented its legendary status with an IMDb score of 8.1. In comparison, the Sonic The Hedgehog film only rated a 6.5 (the same score as its sequel), despite praise for the acting and taking on early fan feedback.

The film was also a speedy success, netting a global return of almost $320M on a production budget of $90M. This included $149M from the US box office, with second-highest-grossing The Angry Birds Movie left in the dust at $107.5M.

A Knuckles TV series is already in the works, and while this is also likely to be a money-spinner, it's doubtful that any live-action adventure will ever capture the gaming pleasures set by the world's second most-famous hedgehog.

A fan of the above film adaptations? Then you might be interested in these too:

• Clue may not be the greatest black comedy ever made (2019's Ready Or Not is a much better example of the genre) but it had one thing that made it unique during its 1985 theatrical release.
  

  
  Depending on which cinema you attended, you would be shown one of three possible endings. As a bonus fact, a fourth ending was filmed but not included in the finished gimmick.

  The film has since gained cult status, and its touch lingers still lingers in films today – such as Rian Johnson's Knives Out and Glass Onion.

• 2012's Battleship was a notorious sinker for both Universal and Hasbro, earning $303 million worldwide against a production budget of $209–220.

At 131 minutes long, Battleship cost approximately $1.6m per minute while disappointing audiences in almost every way – similar to its own (later released) video game version.

• Finally, there's The Lego Batman Movie – is a film built on the success of a game series, based on a toy line, based on an 84-year-old comic.

  There's nothing much more to say about it, except that it's great and everyone should see it at least once.

• Tetris is already one of 2023's best movies, and while it's not 100% faithful to the facts, it's an even more engrossing watch when partnered with 2022's The Tetris Murders.
• King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters is a fantastic documentary that's centred around the world of competitive arcade gaming. It's rated as an 8.0 by IMDb, and was even rumoured to be getting a fictionalised remake starring Johnny Depp.
• Atari: Game Over was released in 2014 and documents the excavation of a landfill site where 700,000 Atari 2600 E.T. game cartridges were rumoured to be buried.
• Indie Game: The Movie is an award-winning documentary following the makers of Super Meat Boy, Fez, and Braid at various stages of their games' lives.
• Pi was Darren Aronofsky's first film, and while it chiefly focuses on the concepts of mathematics and religion, scenes including the board game Go are used to tie the whole thing together.

Not one film in our top ten scored higher than its game equivalent, which just goes to show the love that gamers have for these more-interactive adventures.

If our list has inspired you to go back and play these classics, then a Crucial SSD will give you enough storage space for all ten while you await news on the long-awaited Zelda movie!

Below is our extended list of films based on video games:

• The list of films was gathered from Wikipedia, along with their worldwide box office numbers.
• IMDb was used to source the global scores of each video game and its most relevant film.
• Box office numbers for individual countries were taken from Box Office Mojo.
• All box office numbers are presented in $USD for easier comparison.

¹ Based on video at 4K/60fps in H246 format at 24GB/hr.