Video game movies have a long history of letting down fans. Some of them might go over as a good/decent movie but most of them go away from the original content. I see a lot of movies, and I usually give the video game based movies a shot even if I’m not a fan of the game it’s based on. This list will be about some of the movies that have been made over the years that fans of the games wish were never made, or at least wish they didn’t share the same name.

I want to make it clear that not all of these movies are bad; they just don’t feel like they should be associated with the game. I’m actually one of the few people that don’t consider many movies I see bad, I try to see what they are going for and try to go with it. Now having said that, some of the movies on this list are straight up bad. Regardless if they go by the game lore or not.

Some of the movies on this list were actually big hits and spawned some sequels. I know that most of you know that there are like 15 Resident Evil movies! Most of the movies here were one and done and kind of made as an experiment to see how they went over. My intent isn’t to hate on these movies, but to show how off the mark some of these landed. So let’s get to it!

25 Warcraft

I actually liked this movie quite a bit! I thought it was a loud/fun movie with some decent storytelling and good action. I feel I’m in the minority with that, and that’s why I wanted this movie on the list. I don’t play World of Warcraft at all, though! I know that people who love WoW had very mixed feelings. Apparently, the story was way off the game’s and they made some stuff/characters up. Duncan Jones directed it and his career kinda went down after. He directed the Netflix movie Mute, which was not good at all!

24 Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time

I remember seeing trailers for this move literally every time I went to the theaters, and was honestly never interested in it. I get wanting to have star power for your movie, but getting Jake Gyllenhaal to be the prince wasn’t the best choice.

The movie had decent action, looked impressive, and Ben Kingsley can do no wrong!

Even with all that, it was not what fans of the game were looking for. It made a decent amount of money, but the backlash was strong enough for this to be one and done!

23 BloodRayne

I remember playing BloodRayne 2 when it came out in 2004, and I legit had fun with that game! Yeah, the story was dumb and the voice acting was kinda meh, but it was fun! Then the BloodRayne movie came out in 2005 and… yeah. It wasn’t the worst movie ever or anything, but it was far from something you’d need to see.

This movie spawned two sequels, for some reason.

The violence was pretty good, but that’s about it. Yet another mediocre video game movie that Ben Kingsley signed up for!

22 Hitman: Agent 47

The first Hitman movie came out in 2007 and I’ll defend that movie, I really liked it. Its sequel Agent 47, on the other hand… not so much. I like Rupert Friend in Homeland, but he just didn’t look/feel like 47. The action was pretty good, but the story was kind of all over the place. I’ve always thought that Hitman would make a solid TV show on Netflix or something. Having him take out a different target each episode could be fun, but we just have one solid movie and one meh movie instead.

21 Max Payne

The one good thing I’ll say about this movie is it nailed the look and feel. It was dark, gritty, and the action was good! Other than that though, it’s not a great movie. I like Mark Wahlberg, but he was not the right choice to play Max! I’m not against the base content being toned down and the movie being PG-13, but I do think the movie suffered from that. The slo-mo scenes were cool but making them violent would’ve been a smarter choice. It tried to be a noir movie, but just ended up being mediocre.

20 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

I honestly wouldn’t have put this movie on this list if it wasn’t for the new Tomb Raider movie that came out last year. That movie captured who Lara is and did a good job of showing her exploration. This movie was pretty sensualized and was just a popcorn movie.

Angelina Jolie does look like the original Lara, though.

The Tomb Raider games are definitely more adventure games than action, but this movie is more action. It was cool that John Voight played her dad in this, since that’s her real dad.

19 Double Dragon

I remember watching this movie a decent amount as a kid, but looking back on it, man… it does not hold up. The original game didn’t have much of a story, so this movie fleshed out what little was there. I get that they were going for a corny vibe with the dialogue, but it’s so overdone and the writing is just a bunch of nope! The guy that plays T-1000 in T2 (Robert Patrick) is the main villain and he has a ridiculous haircut… so it’s got that going for it.

18 Wing Commander

This is one of those movies that everyone seems to forget exists, and with good reason! It’s one of those late 90s space movies that kinda got lost in the mix. Starship Troopers came out 2 years earlier and had much better visuals!

The original game came out in 1990.

A big thing that hurt this movie, in my opinion, is that it came out the same year as Star Wars Episode 1. I get that a lot of people don’t care for that movie, but come on, it’s Star Wars and this so wasn’t!

17 Postal

Postal is a game that I’ve never played but I have seen a decent amount of it on YouTube over the years. I know a big thing about it was that it had senseless violence to basically everyone in the game world. Well when the movie came out, it definitely seems like they captured that. The problems was that they made a bad movie to tie in with all the violence. Some of it was funny, I’ll admit, but that’s about all it was. I guess it does make sense to have a bad movie go along with a bad game, right?

16 Pixels

I’ll admit, there are parts of this movie that I laughed at! The whole point of the movie is ridiculous and it works for me, but people hate this movie! I get it, it takes all the classic games we grew up playing and they’re thrown in a mediocre Adam Sandler movie.

I usually watch anything with Ashley Benson in it.

Having Donkey Kong as the main villain was whatever, but the Space Invaders destroying things was pretty cool. I get why people want to act like this movie doesn’t exist, it’s not great but it’s not terrible either.

15 Need For Speed

The best Need For Speed games that I’ve played have been pretty light on the story and more about just racing, drifting, and having a decent open world. I like Aaron Paul, but this is one of those movies that doesn’t need to exist. It has a bit of a Fast and the Furious vibe to it but it doesn’t have the cool factor those movies have. I’m going to be honest, this movie only came out a few years ago and I forgot it existed until I looked up stuff for this list!

14 Super Mario Bros.

I remember seeing this movie in theaters! This was the video game movie that kind of kicked off the whole “let’s make movies based on video games” craze. I’m not going to defend this movie at all but I did enjoy this movie as a kid!

We learned that Mario’s last name was Mario from this movie.

The thing about all Mario games, outside of the RPG games, is that the story is pretty bare. So with this movie, they kinda had to make stuff up and ya know, actually have characters talk. That Yoshi scene, though!

13 In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

Normally if a movie has Jason Statham in it I’m down to check it out! This one even had Ron Perlman in it and this is the result we got. I don't know much about the Dungeon Siege games outside of playing a little bit of the third game several years ago.

Burt Reynolds plays the king.

From what I played of the third game, it seemed very Dragon Age/Diablo and this movie does not feel that way. It comes off as just a medieval movie with a surprising amount of talent in it!

12 Tekken

As someone who knows nothing about the Tekken games, I thought this movie was alright. The fighting was cool and it’s got a banger of a soundtrack! I know the games have a pretty deep lore and people were let down by the story with some characters acting different than they do in the games. It has a kind of Mortal Kombat feel to it, so that could be why I thought it was fine. It does have Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa in it and he played Shang Tsung in the Mortal Kombat movie, so that might explain that, who knows.

11 House Of The Dead

The only reason I didn't put this movie up higher is because I’m pretty sure the directors/producers knew this was a terrible movie, and I want to focus on movies going in a wrong direction. There’s literally a scene in this movie where the characters are shooting zombies and they splice clips of the game in with it… like… what!? It’s based on a light gun/arcade game that was really made to just shoot zombies so honestly, what did everyone expect! It’s worth watching this movie just to see how bad it is though!

10 DOOM

The coolest thing about this movie was the one scene they did in first-person and I’m pretty sure that was the first movie to do that! Other than that…not great. Them being on Mars and having a gun called the B.F.G. are about the only things they kept from the games. This was made before DOOM 2016 so they only had the early games to go on.

The Rock turns into a demon… that’s kinda cool.

I will say that the action is good and I like Karl Urban and Rosamund Pike. It’s worth watching just don’t expect much underworld or demons going on!

9 Assassin’s Creed

Man, I had very high expectations for this movie! I want to say that I thought it was fine; it was just a bit of a letdown. I love Michael Fassbender and I honestly thought this would be the movie to turn video game movies around. It mainly takes place outside the Anumis, and Fassbender’s character was invented for this movie. The action and cinematography are very good, and the acting is fine! I just wanted it to feel like an Assassin’s Creed movie and it really didn’t. It is canon, though, because events of this movie are mentioned in Assassin’s Creed: Origins.

8 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle Of Life

I know that I put the first Tomb Raider movie on here already, but this is the one that people seem to really dislike! I’m guessing it’s because it’s even more action-oriented than the first, and people wanted a female Indiana Jones. That’s not really what this movie was. The story wasn’t as strong in this one and adding a romance with Gerard Butler wasn’t looked at great, seeing as Lara didn’t have many relationships in the games. The action was solid and the story was fine but this was the second attempt at it and it didn’t go over very well with fans.

7 Silent Hill: Revelation

Silent Hill 1/2 are among the scariest horror games I’ve ever played and was interested when I heard they were making a movie. I actually liked the first one but this second one was a bit all over the place. They do continue the story from the first one but literally everything is such lower quality. The writing, the acting, and especially the visuals! This one looked so much cheaper! It would’ve been so great to tell a story from one of the games instead of what we got.

6 Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

This movie hurt my soul! I loved the first movie and Johnny Cage literally perishes in the opening moments of this movie for no reason, so I knew I was in for something. It doesn’t really further any characters other than having some in there again.

The Godzilla style fight at the end was next-level bad.

I was so excited when I heard that Baraka was going to be in this movie. The scene he’s in is fine, but the mask he’s wearing is literally moving when he runs and it’s such poor filmmaking to have something like that happen!