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If you've been on the internet long enough, you've probably noticed that no one's talking about the "video game curse" in movies anymore. That is, the idea thta video games are unadaptable to film, as evidenced by a (long, admittedly) series of critical and box office flops based on games that were the exact opposite. However, all that is different now, and if you're looking for a reason why, we've got an explanation from some of the most in-the-know-folks in the game.

Those folks are Dmitri M Johnson and Mike Goldberg, the co-founders behind game-to-movie specialist studio Story Kitchen. In case you didn't know, Story Kitchen was a driving force behind Prime Video's Tomb Raider series and, maybe more importantly, the billion-dollar Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. Speaking on an episode of The Game Business Show, the pair got into the primary reason that video game adaptations were known to fail in the past, and what's changed.

"It is mission critical," says Goldberg, "If the games rights holder, the developer or publisher, or both, is not involved or is minimally involved, it will be to the detriment of the adaptation. It's worse than playing your hand in Las Vegas [at the] craps table. They need to be involved. You would be erasing the creative engine that has built these characters, these worlds, these tones, these fans."

Johnson jumps in to point to the original, widely-panned Super Mario Bros. movie form 1993, saying it's an example of film studios and video game creators not "finding the right balance" of creative ownership of the adaptation.

Goldberg continues to say that, when Studio Kitchen was founded, video game creators had their ideas respected maybe 25% of the time, to which Johnson responds:

"25 is too high."

Now, the pair see the breakdown as an 85/15% breakdown of Hollywood respecting game creators' ideas vs. not, and as the article above points out, we have things like The Last of Us, 2023's Super Mario Brothers movie, and of course, Sonic the Hedgehog as proof of that. Even still, says Goldberg, that 15% is made up of studios who make choices "really to their detriment, and we specifically go out of our way to not work with them."

You don't need to beat the game to prepare for the next one—here are all the major new and upcoming games coming our way.