Hey everybody. brentalfloss here. Yes, it’s officially spelled with no capital letters.

Ahem…

We’ve seen it happen time and time again: Hollywood gets its oily, coked-up clutches on the rights to a beloved video game from our childhood and proceeds to butcher it royally on the big screen. The following is a short but potent list of the four worst examples.
Brace yourself; it won’t be pretty.

STREET FIGHTER
Remember that time a competent creative team banded together and made a film called Street Fighter about a street-brawl tournament fought in various exotic locations around the world? Me neither. To be fair, it’s not exactly a recipe for an Oscar-winning film, but that’s what you have to work with when you’re basing a movie on Street Fighter, right?

Wrong.

In the film version, M. Bison is an evil druglord/dictator who’s threatening to kill hostages if he isn’t paid $20 billion. Guile (if he’s your favorite character in the game, you might be a douche) is somehow the main character. Less than 15% of the film involves fighting, and less than 0% of said fighting occurs in a street.

But what really chafes my thighs about this movie is the fact that the writers bent over backwards to include not only the eight original characters from Street Fighter II, but almost all of the sixteen characters from Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (they arbitrarily cut poor Fei Long out);

Fei Long: The Tom Bombadil of Street Fighter: The Movie

and yet, despite the painstaking task of giving all these characters the same physical characteristics as their in-game counterparts, they threw everything else about them to the wind and moved them around like action figures in a totally unrelated plot. It’s like if you made a movie called Harry Potter where Harry Potter is a salty old detective who does magic tricks with cards and touches kids inappropriately.

Okay, it’s not exactly like that, but it’s equally lame. And somehow it’s the one movie on our list that made money at the box office instead of losing it. That must have made Raul Julia’s soul happy.

BUDGET: $35 million
WORLDWIDE REVENUE: $100 million
NET GAIN: $65 million dollars; one for each disappointed child.

DOOM
Here we have another example of an easy-to-understand, hard-to-fuck-up formula:
A badass space marine is sent to Mars where some scientists are experimenting on stuff. Suddenly, one of the experiments goes—ahem—horribly, horribly wrong, and a portal to Hell is opened. Demons from Hell pour in, and the space marine has to shoot his way out.
Simple, right?

Do you smell what The Rock is cooking? Does it smell like an hour and fifty- three minutes of elephant shit?

To their credit, the writers of the Doom movie honored a few elements of the game’s premise: It takes place on Mars, and a group of space marines have to shoot the shit out of a bunch of unattractive creatures. I was even alright with their choice to cast The Rock (A.K.A. Dwayne Johnson A.K.A. Douchecastle McDisneyAids) as one of the leads.

However, they left out the most important conceit of the game: Hell! Part of what made the creatures so pants-shittingly scary in the original game is the idea that they emerged from the bowels of Hades! In the movie version, the writers replaced Satan’s fan club with humanoid creatures and explain them away by giving them a “24th chromosome”. An extra chromosome? What is this, Doom or Night of the Living Special Olympics? If you already have creepy mutants on Mars, is it that much more of a stretch to make them demons too? Hollywood logic pisses me off sometimes.

BUDGET: $70 million

WORLDWIDE BOX REVENUE: $55 million

NET LOSS: $15 million

FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN

In the year 2001, when this film was released, there were fifteen titles in the Final Fantasy canon including spin-offs. The blockbuster series was known worldwide and was synonymous with the “Role Playing Game” genre. Much has been said over the years about The Spirits Within, so I’ll be brief:

What makes it unique in this list is the fact that that the Final Fantasy series’ creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, gets a “story by” credit above any of the actual screenwriters. That means that the guy who came up with the entire idea behind the Final Fantasy series was also in charge of the story of the film which shared the title.

Googling “Final Fantasy Aki Nude” makes this film slightly less wasteful

So why in the name of Xenu would he throw out all the surprisingly compelling and truly enduring storylines from Final Fantasy games I-thru-X in favor of a COMPLETELY UNRELATED STORY? WHAT THE FUCKBALLS IS THAT ABOUT?!

What about the four elements? What about magic? What about Chocobos, goddamnit?!

Ultimately, Hironobu got what he had coming to him. Or lost it, rather:

BUDGET: $137 million

WORLDWIDE REVENUE: $85 million

NET LOSS: Approx. $94 million after the studio took their share of the box-office gross.

At the time, it was the biggest loss of any film in history.Hironobu had failed, and everyone was shouting his name:

“Hero? No. Boo!”

And now, the video game movie that takes the cake, and by takes the cake I mean it makes me want to pluck my eyes out with chopsticks more than any other movie based on anything ever:

SUPER MARIO BROS.

The official backstory of Mario—Nintendo’s Mickey Mouse—is as varied and inconsistent as it is unimportant, but here’s what we know for sure: He lives at least part of the time in the Mushroom Kingdom, he loves a Princess whose name is Peach, and he is unceasingly called upon to save his drag queen-looking sweetie from the clutches of Bowser Koopa, an intimidating lizard/turtle/clown. Mario’s also got a scaredy-cat brother named Luigi and he’s friends with an anthropomorphic mushroom dude named Toad who works for the Princess (More about him here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=615PWcBIH0U )

Rewind to the year 1993: The World Wide Web was but a mewling infant in the arms of a few übergeeks, the Super Nintendo was far and away the most ass-kicking console ever created, and a movie ticket cost about five bucks. Kids everywhere flipped their nut when they first heard about a live-action adaptation of Super Mario, and they lined up on May 28^th of that year to consummate their personal relationship with the Nintendo-Christ. And what did they get? A hundred and four minutes of buttflowers.

All those poor kids—myself incuded—sat on the edges of their sticky movie theater seats, teeming with nervous excitement through all of the previews, paying attention for the first time in their lives as they eagerly anticipated the face-melting experience that was sure to follow.

Instead, the first thing they saw was this Turd Casserole: Making you watch this hurts me more than it hurts you.

What the fuck is this, one of those straight-to-video Land Before Time sequels? Around the 45-second mark, the narrator (wastefully voiced by The Simpsons’ brilliant Dan Castalleneta) starts asking questions that sound like a Hollywood pitch meeting for one of those godawful SyFy Original Movies. This isn’t The Land of the FUCKING Lost, goddammit, it’s the SUPER MARIO MOVIE!!!

…I digress. After another 90 seconds of unnecessary footage, we’re introduced to… our heroes? NO. A TRIO OF GODDAMNNED NUNS. What the flippity-floppity-fuck is going on here?! Then, a human baby is hatched out of an egg. At this point, I’m pretty sure most of the parents present were double-checking to make sure they were in the theater showing Super Mario Bros. and not The effing Lawnmower Man.

I’ll spare you the play-by-play of the entire film, although suffice it to say I could write a volume of commentary on this anal wart of a film that would dwarf War and Peace.

Here are the would-be bullet points of such a commentary:

*Two Italians are played by Bob Hoskins (an Englishman) and John Leguizamo (a Latino). In isolation, this isn’t a dealbreaker; but read on:

*Koopa is a goddamn human. I don’t care if he “devolves” into a dinosaur. He’s Donald Trump with a hair transplant and half a tube of BrylCreem up ins. Lame.

*Daisy—at that point a minor character featured in only one Mario title—is the Princess whom our heroes must save. What the efffff?

*In the movie, Luigi is the driving, dynamic force of the brothers Mario. In every other incarnation of this duo ever, Luigi has been Scaredy-Pants McChickenberg. Why is he now the daring Romeo, dragging a reluctant Mario around?

*Toad is depicted in the film as a A) bumbling B) human C) henchman who D) works for Koopa. This is too exaggerated and complex in its retardedness to comment further.

*They took the notion of helpful mushrooms—a basic precept of the Mario universe—and translated it to the screen as an all encompassing, sometimes-benevolent FUNGUS. They took something beautiful and made it ugly and disgusting; it’s as if some titty mag showed us what Vida Guerra’s ass will look like in 40 years.

* Would it have been too much to ask to incorporate the universally-recognized SMB1 overworld theme into the score somewhere? Even the taintastic Inspector Gadget movie found a way to incorporate its classic theme song, why couldn’t this movie with a budget of $42 million make it happen?

*The big screen version of “Little Goombas” are eight feet tall.

"Little Goomba"

"Big Fucking Hollywood Asshole Goomba"

Fuck you, everyone involved.

In conclusion, watching Super Mario Bros. makes me want to stab my urethra with a oversized novelty pencil.

BUDGET: $42 million

DOMESTIC REVENUE: $20 million

DOMESTIC NET LOSS: $22 million

If the history of creating films based on video games has taught us anything, it’s this: Hollywood continues to think that it has to bastardize the premise of a game to the point where it’s barely recognizable in order to guarantee its box office success. They have a desire to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, which too often causes them to explain away the most fantastic elements of a game with cutesy exposition. I am here to tell the assholes of Hollywood that the basic stories of video games are generally either fine the way they are, or shouldn’t be adapted to film in the first place!

Case in point, one of the highest-grossing video game movies of all time barely changes the formula of its source material at all; that film is Mortal Kombat. The movie’s about what the game is about. It doesn’t try to be smarter or more universal and it doesn’t drastically exclude any elements, nor does it tack on dramatically new elements to suit a lazy duct-tape adaptation. Its writers simply set out to rock off the socks off of their ten-to-twenty-year-old male demographic, and guess what, bitches? It made ninety-two million dollars. Fuck you, Hollywood. Fuck you real hard.

P.S. And don’t fuck up the Zelda movie when you finally get your sleazy, slow-pokey ass around to making it. If you cast Robin Williams as Link, so help me God…

brentalfloss is a guest contributor to Nerdfit and his videos can be seen at http://youtube.com/brentalfloss