After decades of being viewed as a ‘cursed’ genre, video game movies are finally starting to shake that long-held stigma, but they’ve still got a long way to go. They might finally have started to catch on at the box office, with five of the six highest-grossing adaptations ever having been released since 2016, but widespread critical acclaim has been a lot harder to come by.
In fact, out of the dozens of video game movies that have hit theaters since Super Mario Bros. got the genre off to a less than auspicious start back in 1993, only two of them of managed to secure a Rotten Tomatoes rating of over 60%. That being said, Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog are the two most recent entries to land on our screens, so the reputation of the video game movie might well be on the ascendancy.
Next out of the gate is Monster Hunter, which hails from genre veteran Paul W.S. Anderson, who spearheaded the Resident Evil franchise with his wife and frequent collaborator Milla Jovovich playing the lead role. The $60 million fantasy flick is still slated to arrive in September, and now a new image of Jovovich’s Captain Natalie Artemis has made its way online, which you can see down below.
The Resident Evil series may not have found much love from critics, but the movies definitely had plenty of fans, becoming the most lucrative string of video game adaptations ever after raking in over $1.2 billion globally. However, Monster Hunter isn’t as well-known to most audiences, and it would be putting it lightly to say that Anderson’s track record when it comes to effects-heavy blockbusters has been very hit-or-miss. As such, this one could easily fall at either end of the video game movie spectrum when it lands in three months’ time.