On the heels of the blockbuster release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Jack Black is singing his praises for video game adaptations. So much so that he has praised The Last of Us on HBO Max.
In an interview with BBC yesterday, Black, who voices Bowser, that he’s a fan of multimedia adaptations of video games so long as they’re treated right. He praised HBO’s The Last of Us for how faithful it is to the hit PlayStation game.
“The Last of Us was fantastic,” he said. “And what’s crazy is how loyal it is to the original source material. It’s basically all from the game with just a couple of tweaks. It’s going to win all the awards. They used the video game almost like a storyboard and I was like. ‘Whoa, this looks just the same.'”
Black also commented on how, with video game adaptations of movies and TV shows gaining traction, studios will look to adapt more games for years to come. “It will be very interesting to see what happens to the entertainment industry over the next 20 to 30 years but I think we will be seeing more and more storytelling from the gaming universe,” he said.
Red Dead Redemption next?
One video game adaptation the character actor wants to see on the big screen is Red Dead Redemption from Rockstar Games, because he believes “that [has] just as good or [an] even better story than The Last of Us.”
Black’s comments speak to how video game films and TV shows have been gaining popularity in the last few years, starting with Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog. Both of these were considered to have broken the “video game movie curse,” a phenomenon in which past video game adaptations were critically panned, including the 1993 live-action Super Mario Bros. film, The Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, and even Ratchet and Clank.
The popularity of video game adaptations now is such that Netflix series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Arcane: League of Legends were nominated for Best Adaptation at The Game Awards 2022, with the latter show taking that honor home on top of being the first streaming series to win an Emmy for Best Outstanding Animated Program. Today, more games are being adapted to screens big and small, including God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, and Borderlands.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is in theaters now. For more on Illumination’s first video game outing, read our review.
Cristina Alexander is a freelance writer at IGN.
