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There are more video game movies and shows being made than ever. For every Super Mario Mario shooting for the stars at the box office, however, there are several more middling efforts – including Prime Video's recent live-action Yakuza series and Return to Silent Hill – that didn't quite recapture the magic players experienced on consoles.
But, still, there is gold in them there video game hills. And a rush has ensued: Helldivers, Duke Nukem, It Takes Two, and Metal Gear Solid have all been unveiled as potential projects over the past few years.
Now, there are more video game adaptations being unveiled than at any other point. “Video game adaptations have been on the rise since the second half of 2023, with no fewer than 25 being announced in each half-year since," analyst Ricardo Parsons recently told The Wrap.
But Devil May Cry showrunner Adi Shankar, in typically outspoken form during an interview with GamesRadar+, is certain most of those are going to fall by the wayside.
"I just don't think most of these things are going to come to fruition, because there's so many stakeholders," Shankar says. "It's easy to [say] we're gonna adapt this game. But that's nothing new. There have been announcements of comic book movies, video game movies and TV shows. That's been part of the media cycle since the '90s, for sure."
Shankar adds, "We're not going to get to a point where 50 a year are going to be made. They're announcing a lot… If we're talking straight adaptations – like we're treating this video game as a novel – [and] we have 50 of those a year, at that point the audience is going to be really excited about original stuff."
Even those that do make it past the initial announcement phase, in Shankar's eyes, won't be up to scratch – whether that's because of the various corporate hoops it needs to jump through or, in some cases, those series already being weighed down by being a huge brand unto themselves.
"I think inevitably, most video game adaptations that come out will be cringe, because when you look at the video games that are massively successful, they're not really run by the people that made the games. They're run by corporations who have now assigned brand managers to manage them, right?" Shankar posits.
"It's also a brand. At that point,when a video game gets treated like a brand that long, it becomes a logo. You're slapping the logo onto things [and] you've got countless spin offs and mobile games and whatnot… Well, now everything's a brand, man. At that point, you're like, well, where's the Captain Crunch movie?"
Devil May Cry, though, aims to sidestep that for something that captures the spirit of Capcom's hack-and-slash series without outright copying it. Devil May Cry season 2, out next week, even teases a fraught family reunion as Vergil enters twin brother Dante's crosshairs.
Devil May Cry season 2 hits Netflix on May 12.
For more, here are all the upcoming video game movies currently in the works.
