TV AND FILM
What is behind the rise of videogame adaptations – and what’s coming next?
Even if you don’t spend much time watching TV or films, you can’t have missed the renaissance in videogame adaptations. While there has long been a tradition of videogame-based anime series in Japan, occasionally breaking through to the west, the past few years have seen an explosion on both small and big screens – and that is only set to grow. Forthcoming movies will explore the worlds of Minecraft, The Legend Of Zelda, Borderlands and Death Stranding, while games slated for TV shows include Among Us, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Dead Cells and System Shock. That’s for the future, but where did the revival begin?
Hélène Juguet, managing director of Ubisoft Film & TV Paris, moved across from the videogame side of the business in 2014. It hasn’t been an especially fruitful decade for Ubisoft’s entertainment division – the memory of 2016’s Assassin’s Creed movie lingers – but that’s starting to change, following a partnership with Netflix that will result in four TV series, beginning with last year’s Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix animation and culminating with a second bite of the Assassin’s Creed cherry.
Juguet credits this turnaround to the rise of streaming services (“they were the first to get it”) alongside a generation of creatives and executives who have grown up with videogames, encouraging an industry-wide shift. But the biggest factor, she admits, was a handful of hits “that changed the perception of videogames”, all arriving in quick succession between 2021 and 2023.
“In animation, you had Arcane from Riot, and Cyberpunk [Edgerunners] around the same time,” she says. “You had the Last Of Us TV series, and the Mario movie.” There’s nothing that Hollywood loves more than a proven success, and all of these examples hit the mark. Arcane topped Netflix’s viewership charts after its release in November 2021, The Last Of Us’s first episode gave HBO its second-biggest premiere since 2010, and The Super Mario Bros Movie was the second highest-grossing film of 2023. “The reaction was like, ‘Wait, how did we not see that coming?’” Juguet says. “That’s when you start getting calls.”
We sit down with Juguet during London Games Festival’s inaugural Screen Play conference, on April 10. Just as we’re talking, the Fallout series is making its debut on Amazon’s Prime Video service – adding, surely, another name to that list. Over the next 16 days, the show attracts 65m viewers, becoming the second most-watched show in the streamer’s history.
