This year has seen successful transfers from games to the big screen. The Super Mario movie is one of them. Younger audiences in particular are interested in stories from the world of games, writes culture editor Päivi Puukka.
The film didn’t get any stars from professional critics, but whatever. Mario attracted almost 50 000 admissions on its opening weekend in Finland, making it by far the most watched film in the country this year.
Globally, success is usually measured by the pot a film makes. *Super Mario*, a collaboration between game company Nintendo and animated film producer Illumination, grossed an all-time high of almost $377 million in its opening weekend.
– Actually *Super Mario Bros. Move* has a lot of good things going for it. As the playing father of a 6-year-old who loves games, I think I’m hitting the right target audience,” says McDonald.
– The film’s plot was thin, as was feared, but Mario games don’t have many plot twists to draw from. At the end of the day, Mario is just a grumpy plumber who hates mushrooms. Still, I was quite satisfied with the experience.
The game is still going strong, which is of course crucial. Mario unites generations and the film attracts very different types of audience combos to the movie theater.
According to the latest statistics of the Finnish Film Foundation *Super Mario Bros. Movie* has been seen by 79,532 viewers by the last statistical day (April 11).
The viewer numbers of another game movie can serve as a comparison figure. *Dungeons
Of course, adaptations of games into a narrative format have been done for a long time. Instead, few successes have been seen.
Even the most famous game series with an established and large fanbase have not moved to the big screen without friction.
The filmmakers seem to have invented a new way to deal with the storytelling of games. It seems that serious investment has been made in scriptwriting and design.
The storytelling utilizes the narrative strengths of the new platform, and doesn’t just work as a straightforward adaptation of the game. In a game, functionality is usually a priority, and as such, the constant scrambling gets boring in a movie.
Now that the power of game adaptations has been proven, video games seem to be a new book for the creators of movies and TV series. The younger audience in particular seems to be more fascinated by the characters and worlds of familiar games than stories borrowed from literature.
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