Let's face it, no matter how good you think Mortal Kombat was, as a movie it wasn't that good. Neither were the Resident Evil ones, or Silent Hill. Prince of Persia was a big budget meh and Warcraft… had good CGI. So why do movies based on games fail so many times?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMVaw33X02M

Doom was great.
The first Resident Evil was great.
Silent Hill was meh, but I thought the ending was great.
And the two Dead Space movies were great.

I haven't seen Warcraft but it was a massive hit in China. How can a billion people be wrong!?

The Tomb Raider movies weren't great, but I didn't think they were horrible or even bad either. Quite solid and entertaining enough.

Ugh, "great" might be a bit of an exageration.
I respect your opinion, I just strongly disagree :p
I thought it was mediocre, thankfully I watched in TV, so no money wasted on that thing!
Unless you was being sarcastic.

Doesn't the OP make one of these threads every day?

He must have less of a life than I do. :P

Wait, so this movie wasn't a cinematic masterpiece???

But seriously, I think the reason is that storytelling in games and movies works completely different. Movies normally concentrate on the story, the characters and dramatization. Games on the other hand are mostly about interactivity and the story often is negligible (I know there are exceptions). When you take away the interactivity (which you have to when you make a movie) there's nothing much left.

I liked Silent Hill and the Resident Evil movies personally, as well as the Tomb Raider films, and even the DOOM movie although it wasn't amazing.

I think the ones that fail, do so because they're trying to milk a cow without the proper expertise to make it succeed.

Because they want to make money and not a good movie.

You could buy an used PS2, it shouldn't be too expensive.
It's also available for Wii and Xbox.

I DELETED IT!? XD

Someone want to explain to our friend here that users are not capable of deleting threads. :P

Future Cops was fun. I was also plenty entertained by Double Dragon.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is based on a visual novel and directed by Takashi Miike(!) .. might be worth checking out!

But I think the reason most movies based on games suck is the same reason most comic book movies suck: The only games/comics that gets made into movies are the big ones. This means that it becomes a big budget Holywood production, where they have little love for the source material.

Silent Hill I always name as a success story when it comes to movie adaptations of games. It might not be 100% true to the game itself, but it had the guts to be its own thing and I'm very fond of the outcome. Also, it met my taste of a horror story that had great atmosphere but doesn't leave you scared out of your mind after the credits roll.

From what I'm reading in this thread, I now wanna watch the Doom movie.

But yeah, I too think that many adaptations fail because game scripts rarely work as movie scripts, if film writers and directors won't put in the work and have the understanding that film requires a different approach than games.

I read a thing about when they were making the movie, while they were whiling to vary from the game itself (as you mentioned) they realized they simply couldn't fail to include "pyramid head". Problem is, they didn't have any way to fit him into the story, so last minute they just decided to toss him into a scene for no reason whatsoever with zero explanation, just to make fans of the game happy.

Because people with no clue say "Because we can."

I mean, there's now a "Pete's Dragon" remake, for cripe's sake. Not a game movie, I know, but illustrates the point.