How bad are video game movies?

We know that most movies that are based on a video game are usually bad. But how bad really? I got this list from Wikipedia and I will do some basic statistics.

Title Year Box office rev (m) Rotten Tomatoes “%” Metacritic ”/100”
Super Mario Bros. 1993 $21 15
Double Dragon 1994 $2 8
Street Fighter 1994 $99 12
Mortal Kombat 1995 $122 33 58
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation 1997 $51 3 11
Wing Commander 1999 $12 10 21
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider 2001 $275 19 33
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within 2001 $85 44 49
Resident Evil 2002 $102 33 33
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life 2003 $157 24 43
House of the Dead 2003 $14 4 15
Resident Evil: Apocalypse 2004 $129 21 35
Alone in the Dark 2005 $10 1 9
Doom 2005 $56 19 34
BloodRayne 2006 $4 4 18
Silent Hill 2006 $98 29 30
DOA: Dead or Alive 2006 $8 34 38
Postal 2007 $0 8 22
Resident Evil: Extinction 2007 $148 22 41
Hitman 2007 $100 14 35
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale 2008 $13 4 15
Far Cry 2008 $1 12
Max Payne 2008 $85 16 31
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li 2009 $13 6 17
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time 2010 $336 36 50
Resident Evil: Afterlife 2010 $296 23 37
Resident Evil: Retribution 2012 $240 30 39
Silent Hill: Revelation 2012 $52 5 15
Need for Speed 2014 $203 23 39
Hitman: Agent 47 2015 $82 8 28
Ratchet & Clank 2016 $12 17 29
The Angry Birds Movie 2016 $343 43 43
Warcraft 2016 $432 29 32

On average, a movie will make you $110m and get you 18% on Rotten Tomatoes and 31/100 on Metacritic. I wonder if its possible to sarcastically make a movie? Paint-by-numbers for the script as a joke and it actually gets the same rating as it was made honestly.

budgettorating

Do ratings and revenue follow each other? Yes. The correlation is around 0.6. Closer to 1 than it is to 0. This means that the world works. Roughly. Usually, if the critics hate your movie, you will not make much money. The data somewhat agrees with that.

So how much money is each point of critic love? About $6m. So for every percentage point that you get from Rotten Tomatoes, you will make about $6m. If you have 50%, you will make $300m. The Metacritic figure is about 35% less. $3.8m is the value and on average, they tend to rate movies higher.  18% on RT and 31 on MC.

Does MC and RT rate movies similarly? Yes. The correlation is about 0.87. If the correlation was a 1, it would mean that they rate movies identically and if it was a 0, it would mean that there is no similarity.

The best movie according to RT is Final Fanatsy: The spirits within with a 44%. I think i saw it. Ming na does the voice acting? MC gave it a 49/100.

The best movie according to MC is Mortal Kombat with 58/100. We watched this last week, go check the post. RT gave it a 33%.

The worst movie according to RT and MC is 2005’s Alone in the Dark. RT gave it a 1% and MC gave it a 9/100. Thats really low. We much watch it.

I noticed that September and October are a little bit more popular with release months than the rest of the year.

Postal and Far Cry hardly made any money. $146k and $743k respectively. We must watch those junkers too.

So how bad are movies that are based on video games? Very. They don’t make too much money (recently they do) and they usually are rated badly. Bad ratings = low revenue. I think the reason for the recent history for even bad movies to make big money is that they are being released in China too. I dont know how true this is. I assume as much because Adam Sandler movies tend to make its money from non-USA sources. I think the trend will pass in a few years. The eastern audience will wise up to money grabbing movie maker. If they don’t, I’m making a Nokia Snake game.