Comic book movies seem to be dethroning themselves. Super Mario coincidentally being #2 at the box office would be the sort of tipping point for the studios to

Comic book movies seem to be dethroning themselves. Super Mario coincidentally being #2 at the box office would be the sort of tipping point for the studios to hungrily eye an alternate source of IP to adapt. (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2023/ https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2023/ - I will concede that FNAF is all the way at #18, which isn't very impressive). I mean, they're already greenlighting nearly twenty Mattel based projects just because of Barbie (https://www.insider.com/all-upcoming-movies-mattel-toys-barbie-2023-7 https://www.insider.com/all-upcoming-movies-mattel-toys-barb...), it seems like Hollywood hasn't come a long way from the video's intro anecdote about how the original Batman movie ushered in a wave of adaptations of retro pulp heroes, rather than the more naturally lucrative choice of comic book adaptations. So who's to say they won't look at the similar success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and mine video game IP for adaptations? At the same time, I think that other than for Daniel Kaluuya's 'A24-Type' Barney movie, most of the Mattel projects are not even going to see the light of day. It's a much more limited IP vein and once there's a box office bomb or two, the studios will quickly put the kibosh on the outlandish idea. Battleship, for instance, didn't exactly unleash a huge trend of board game movies. Outside of the theaters, The Last of Us being a huge hit and a critical darling would seem to indicate that after decades, we might finally be seeing the end of the video game adaptation curse. The fact that there are any quality video game adaptations now, let alone successful ones, is itself a sea change. And as the video theorizes, maybe this isn't 2008 so much as it's the early '00s when the original X-Men and Spider-Man adaptations came out. A sign of the shift that is to come. But I firmly do believe it so to come. There are far more video games than there are Marvel/DC superhero properties. More genres, even.