Ready, Player One: Video Games Are Coming to TV

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The craving for Intellectual Property that can be reheated and reserved in different formats is now trained on video games. There are a raft of new TV and film adaptations of popular video game titles heading to a streaming platform near you.

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There have been multiple attempts to adapt video games into a narrative screen drama, most of which have been considered creative and box office failures. Among them is Street Fighter starring Jean Claude van Damme from 1994, the Resident Evil series from the Japanese horror video game (from 1996 onwards), Lara Croft which has had two big screen incarnations and Warcraft directed by Duncan Jones.

More recent attempts to convert legacy games into screened entertainment have had more success – perhaps because they’ve been serialised for streaming services and also because they tend not to cleave too close to the original game’s territory.

That’s certainly true of Halo and League of Legends’ series Arcane. Parrot Analytics https://www.parrotanalytics.com/insights/video-games-the-next-big-thing-for-tv/ has crunched the numbers.

Released on March 24, the Paramount+ series Halo has had 38.5 times more demand than the average TV series worldwide. Parrot calls this level of interest “exceptional” despite – indeed because of the fact that the series does not closely follow any of the storylines from the games.

“This balance between the familiarity of the games and a brand new storyline could have likely influenced the success Halo is seeing in terms of demand,” it concludes, further noting that involvement of Steven Spielberg as executive producer can’t have failed to appeal to people who have never played much less even heard of Halo before.

Netflix’s Arcane, released November 2021, attained a level of 31.8 times more global demand than the average series, per Parrot Analytics, while reaching a peak of 33.5 times more demand than the average series worldwide.

Meanwhile, Netflix’ The Witcher is also among the most popular shows on the platform. That Netflix’s adaptation was based on the novels (by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski) rather than the video is considered a plus, but the crossover between the already successful video game series (which sold more than 25 million copies in 2017) is an undoubted element to its success in attracting legacy and new fanbases.

It won’t have escaped Hollywood’s attention that the number one film at the box office just now is not Dr Strange.. but Sonic the Hedgehog 2. A character which had to go back to the drawing board when fans reacted badly to trailers of the first film in 2019 https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-sonic-live-action-trailer-is-bad - is now having its day in the sun.

So much so that Paramount+ is to release a TV spinoff of the film next year. Sega’s original character is now 30+ years old but Parrot notes that it is precisely the generational spanning and worldwide cultural familiarity with the thing that makes the films and the TV show a ready-made cash cow.

What else is in the works? Quite a bit actually as listed out by Kotaku: Every Video Game TV Show Coming In 2022 & Beyond (kotaku.com) 

July 14 sees Netflix launch an episodic version of Resident Evil. Netflix is also funding Splinter Cell, based on the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell franchise, written by Derek Kolstad, the creator behind the John Wick franchise and due in 2023. Writer Jeb Stuart is also adapting Netflix is also Ubisoft franchise Assassin’s Creed for Netflix. ‘Assassin’s Creed’: ‘Die Hard’s Jeb Stuart Set To Write Netflix Series – Deadline (previously made as a feature in 2016 by director Justin Kurzel and starring Michael Fassbender)

Also for 2023, HBO Max has an adaptation of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us in 2023 starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey as Ellie. Interestingly, two actors from the game The Last Of Us TV Show Casts Tommy Actor As Someone New (kotaku.com) will be appearing in the show, but only one of them, Merle Dandridge, will be reprising her role from the original game.

Deadline reports ‘God of War’ TV Series Adaptation Eyed By Prime Video – Deadline that Amazon is in negotiations with PlayStation Studios and Sony to create a live-action TV show based on the God of War franchise; Tomb Raider is coming back as an animated series on Netflix; Amazon is working on a live-action Fallout series based on the popular post-apocalyptic RPG franchise; and there’s a version of Twisted Metal, the Sony PlayStation 25-year old hit title, being produced by NBC for Peacock and starring Anthony Mackie.