The world was a very different place two decades ago. The recession hadn’t yet happened, people were emerging from a period of great paranoia, and video game adaptations were universally despised. This was the era of Doom and Mortal Kombat. These movies were followed by a handful of more mainstream adaptations that did just as poorly. Hollywood simply couldn’t crack the formula, even though every studio knew what a goldmine lay beneath their feet. Things began to change in the last five years, with HBO releasing an acclaimed adaptation of The Last of Us, and Universal producing two back-to-back billion-dollar blockbusters — The Super Mario Bros. Movieand The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
This latest wave of video game adaptations seems to have caught on, but there was a rather unfortunate period around a decade ago that truly backfired. This period was even worse for video game adaptations than the first wave, which at least delivered the long-running Resident Evil franchise. In the mid-2010s, Universal spent nearly $200 million on a Warcraft adaptation and 20th Century Studios released an Assassin’s Creed movie that received an 18% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Neither movie was particularly well-received, of course, but both made significantly more at the box office than the video game adaptations of the 2000s. This was when a Max Payne movie starring a freshly Oscar-nominated Mark Wahlberg failed to crack the $100 million mark worldwide.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Roger Ebert Certainly Kept His Readers on Their Toes
However, aHitman adaptation that was released just one year before Max Payne marginally avoided the same fate. It ended its global run with $101 million, against a reported budget of $24 million. Directed by Xavier Gens, who experienced success last year with his Netflix movie Under Paris, the 2007 Hitman adaptation was headlined by Timothy Olyphant. It also featured Olga Kurylenko and Dougray Scott, and received a 16% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The site’s consensus reads, “Hitman features the unfortunate combination of excessive violence, incoherent plot, and inane dialogue.” While most critics clearly detested the film, the late Roger Ebert gave it of its rare positive reviews. He wrote that the movie “stands right on the threshold between video games and art.” The Hitman movie didn’t get a direct sequel, although a reboot titled Hitman: Agent 47 was released in 2015. The first film is currently among the most popular titles on the domestic Starz chart, according to FlixPatrol. The franchise remains as popular as ever, so don’t be surprised if another reboot is announced. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
