Arcane vs Warcraft: Real Video Game Movies Suck

Are video game movies inherently doomed to fail? The general consensus these days is that no, they aren’t. After all, shows like The Last of Us have been wildly successful, both with critics and with audiences. Why, then, do we have this persistent belief that movies and shows based on video games are bad? It’s simple - because it’s true. Not for all kinds of video games, since narrative-heavy works like The Last of Us can be adapted in similar ways to a novel. No, the video games that suffer from the video game movie curse are those that lack that narrative drive, and in the end, there are only two possible results: losing status as a video game movie, or failure as a movie altogether.

Take Arcane as an example of the first kind of film. No matter how good it is, and it is amazing, it isn’t a video game movie. Sure, it was made using names and designs from League of Legends, but the show isn’t canon. The characterisations are entirely different, the relationships are changed, and even significant parts of the worldbuilding are changed. Arcane is a beautiful story told with beautiful visuals, and I’m sure the changes made were necessary to tell the most effective story possible, but does it even count as an adaptation since its story is so different? Given that Riot Games is apparently considering changing League of Legends lore to match Arcane’s canon, it’s not an adaptation of League of Legends so much as League of Legends is an adaptation of it now, so calling it a video game show seems disingenuous.

The opposite of Arcane’s case is Warcraft. To be entirely honest, I couldn’t make it to the end of the film, but given that I started playing World of Warcraft at an inappropriately young age, that’s not a great sign. Yes, there are positive reviews regarding the CGI, the performances, the action scenes… But the story itself, the most important aspect of any movie, fell flat. To be honest, even the parts that people say are good didn’t actually seem that spectacular to me - they just seemed good in comparison to the trash they were surrounded by. It’s ironic, given how much lore World of Warcraft has, that its plot ended up weaker than Arcane’s. They had endless stories from years of worldbuilding that they could have chosen, and yet still they messed it up.

Part of me can’t help but wonder if lore without direction is where this kind of non-narrative game falls apart when being turned into a movie. The more lore there is in the original work, the higher the expectations of the fans and the more pre-designed elements the creators are tempted to use. Being driven by interesting ideas rather than an interesting story rarely results in anything other than a weird, disjointed mess like Warcraft. When there isn’t much lore, though, the only real option is to abandon the canon and craft a compelling story from scratch like Arcane did. This improves the narrative, as it can be designed more freely, but it ultimately results in a work which simply borrows a video game’s name and aesthetics rather than really being inspired by it.

The best argument against the idea that true “video game movies” like Warcraft always fail is the fact that audiences still tend to like them. “It’s not that the movie is bad, it’s just that the critics are snooty!” To me, though, that’s just further proof of my point. Yes, audiences loved Warcraft, but that’s because it panders directly to them. World of Warcraft is a game where you explore a world and kill things to gain experience and complete points - for the majority of its fans, the joy lies in the beauty of the world and the violence, both of which Warcraft has plenty of, so of course they liked it. It’s true that being popular is one metric of success - but artistic and cultural value is another metric for success, and that’s what the critics’ scores are a reflection of. They indicate how well something worked as a film rather than a commercial product, and that is exactly where Warcraft and other real video game adaptations fail.

I would love for more video games to be made into successful movies, believe me - my partner used to be a streamer and I need some way to figure out what he’s talking about without playing hundreds if not thousands of hours of games I’m not interested in. But the fact of the matter is, after watching Arcane, I don’t have a better understanding of League of Legends, and I didn’t even finish Warcraft despite being a fan. The essence of non-narrative video games, whether they be battle arena PVPs like League of Legends or player-driven open-world RPGs like World of Warcraft simply can’t be translated into a good movie. So yes, the video game movie curse is real, not because all video game adaptations are bad, but because those which actually try to stick to the source material end up sacrificing a lot for that loyalty.