Is Gaming Becoming a Bigger Deal in Hollywood?

It’s been a long time since gaming has been considered an exclusively niche territory. It’s now a pillar of the entertainment industry alongside music and movies, with some examples of the medium generating enormous amounts of money.

However, this doesn’t mean that every audience is likely to take equal notice of it. If you can get Hollywood to take more notice of something, though, you might find that it’s capable of reaching as broad an audience as possible.

With gaming adaptations being attempted for years with varying levels of success, is it now looking like its luck is starting to turn?

The Successful Adaptations

Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario are two of the most iconic and recognizable faces in the gaming landscape, so it’s no surprise that their recent movie adaptations have been successful in showcasing what a successful movie adaptation might look like.

That’s not to say that these films have been entirely positively received, but the reaction has been strong enough and financially viable enough to for sequels to have either been produced or be in production.

For more universally successful adaptations, HBO’s The Last of Us is arguably the prime example. While the source material was already very similar to dramatic television in terms of tone and execution, the acclaim that this adaptation has received has marked it as among the most successful example for many people.

Awareness and Popular Culture

What has helped this process along is the simple increase in general awareness when it comes to gaming, not just as a medium but in terms of the specific imagery and iconography. Popular examples like Minecraft are games that have been parodied or featured in many other forms of entertainment.

While Minecraft is a particularly lucrative example that might make it no wonder that it’s gained broad awareness, you can look to specific characters like Sonic, Mario, Link, Kratos, Solid Snake, Crash Bandicoot, Fallout’s Vault Boy, and many others to see how well known these icons are.

It’s also that there are more roads to gaming than ever before. The games that you’d play at a casino online are a good example of this, a previously physical activity that now can be lumped in with the rest of the gaming genres available, taking people who were exclusively a fan of the former experience and nudging them toward trying what else is now adjacent to that pastime.

Actors in Games

The presence of big actors in video games is nothing new—the original Fallout featured Ron Pearlman and CCH Pounder – but the volume of them and the way that modern technology can imitate their likeness has altered the interaction.

Death Stranding is a game that’s a prime example of this, featuring a cast of actors including Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, Guillermo Del Toro and Mads Mikkelsen rendered in their exact likeness as if they were performing in a movie.

This is a trend that has continued throughout the growth of the medium—Fallout 3 had Liam Neeson in a leading role, and an upcoming game titled Exodus was touted as featuring Matthew McConaughey, showcasing the marketing potential of this effort.