MASSIVE DAMAGE

Recently at the cinemas, the notorious Uwe Boll's newest film, In The Name of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, was released to little fanfare from both audiences and his most dedicated followers. Perhaps it was a sign that the better he got at making films, the more unwatchable that they became; perhaps it was the stigma of January being the dumping ground of awful programming that only becomes successful because it's either a broad comedy or an inoffensive action film (or, as an alternate answer, it's a film made by one of Sony's movie studios and ran ads every two seconds on TV). Whatever the case may be, ITNOTK's failure really can't blamed on either of those things, or that it is, in fact, a film directed by Uwe Boll; video game films simply haven't lit the charts on fire since Angelina Jolie managed to make millions of dollar by keeping her clothes on for Tomb Raider in 2001 (but only the first one; the second film's failure was, amusingly, blamed on the poor reception of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness).

The biggest reason behind this is fairly obvious: people will flock to the films that they've heard about and may have actually played. At first, this may seem like a flawed and an even unreliable explanation, especially given the early failures of films like Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter. However, there was nothing in the advertising for the Super Mario Bros. film that could ever be mistaken for something that was actually inspired by the game millions bought and loved, opting for a more Gilliam-esque approach to the setting. Street Fighter's failure is obvious if you even so much as glanced at the publicity still for the film, revealing it for the "you cannot be serious" cheesiness that inevitably ended up ignored by the public. For a while, it actually seemed as though that the can't miss combination of video games and films was less "peanut butter and jelly" and more "peanut butter and live hand grenade." In 1995, Mortal Kombat all changed that, and it's actually not hard to see why:

1.) It wasn't a dramatic departure from the source material. As I mentioned, the Super Mario Bros. film looked less like the Mushroom Kingdom and more like Time Bandits, minus all the craft; outside of the lack of gore, Mortal Kombat managed to actually resemble the game it was based off, even if it did borrow liberally from Enter the Dragon.
2.) It delivered the action without taxing its audience. Street Fighter's focus was on Guile, but the film often made detours into the histories of the other characters, shifting around with little regard for the patience that the crowd that it primarily targeted. Mortal Kombat, on the other hand, wisely kept the focus on the three hero characters who all had simple motivations for participating in the tournament, with their supporting characters only there to essentially cheer them on while they fought against the villains.
3.) It was a movie based on the most popular game on earth at the time. Super Mario Bros. came out at a time when a blue hedgehog captivated children, whereas Street Fighter's success laid more in the arcades at the time rather than in homes. In 1995, you couldn't walk anywhere without walking into something related to Mortal Kombat; the sequel had just been recently released into arcades with a home port due later that year and the first game was a best-seller.

The film being a success wasn't in question; the degree of success, however, was what took Hollywood by surprise. The film made back it's entire budget ($20 million) in its opening weekend and went on to earn more than $100 million worldwide, an unheard of sum at that time for the fledgling genre. However, this surge ended rather quickly when Mortal Kombat: Annihilation bombed two years later.

Since then, success has always come in the form of "one film does decent-good, three more do awful." For every blockbuster pre-packaged for success like Tomb Raider, you have expensive failures like Wing Commander and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within that fail. The Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises do well enough to justify making sequels (and not much else), but no one was clamoring for House of the Dead 2 or BloodRayne 2. Timing also affected films that were long in gestation, Doom, Hitman and Dead or Alive being forgotten even before they came out.

Maybe audiences just don't want these kinds films; if that's the case, Hollywood needs to reconsider what they can actually sell to audiences. The Halo film seemed like a no brainer, but that project is considered dead these days. Films with less broad appeal like Spy Hunter and Driver remain in limbo. There's other films further off like Onimusha and the much anticipated/dreaded Metal Gear Solid, but is it enough. This isn't the best argument since films based off of comic books continue to do well, with no less than three adaptations poised to do monster business in 2008

What could be the ultimate problem is that in this day and age, we don't need films based off our the games we play to really appreciate them. With budgets being comparable to actual Hollywood production, we can get the same kind of action that they can provide, but in the comfort of our own living rooms. Why drive to the theater to see an action/sci-fi film when you could fire up Gears of War for a couple of hours? A decade ago, you would never have thought that Hollywood's biggest competition wouldn't have come from a box you attach to your TV, but you have to figure they said similar things when the TV itself was introduced.