Long before the Super Mario Bros. movie grossed $1.3 billion, Sega's president tried making a Crash Bandicoot movie but was told "video games is like a toy business"

Sega veteran and the company's current COO and president, Shuji Utsumi, once pitched an idea for a Crash Bandicoot movie but was met with the thankfully now antiquated perception of video games being no more than silly li'l toys.

"When I started to get involved in the video game business, I picked up Crash Bandicoot and started asking some of the movie studios if they were interested in turning that property into a movie," Utsumi told The Game Business. "But I was treated like… 'hey, video games is like a toy business'. They didn't really take it seriously."

Having joined Sony back in 1994 as vice president and then Sega in 1996 as senior vice president overseeing the launch of the Dreamcast, I suppose I can understand the skepticism around video game movies at the time.

Assuming Utsumi was pitching a Crash movie around the beginning of his time with PlayStation, movie studios were probably looking at video game adaptations like the 1994 Street Fighter movie, which performed OK at the box office but flopped critically, and the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, which was a disaster by all measurable metrics.

Still, I feel robbed. A Crash Bandicoot movie from the 1990s would've been so much fun, Rotten Tomatoes be damned.

"Video games are finally getting to be the culture, and that's moving into the movie business," Utsumi added. "That's a big shift for the industry that I am really happy about."

It's demonstrably true that video game movies have come a long, long way since the '80s and '90s. Gone are the days of feature-length Nintendo ads being billed as movies like The Wizard, and laughably bad adapts like the Double Dragon movie; these days it seems Hollywood is finally treating video games as the untapped well of potential we've all known about for decades.

As if my point isn't being driven home as we speak by the Minecraft movie crushing it at the box office, the 2023 Super Mario Bros. movie grossed $1.3 billion and became the highest grossing animated film and second highest grossing movie overall that year.

Recent years have also brought about the release of commercially successful screen adaptations of games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Pokemon, Mortal Kombat, Uncharted, and Warcraft, not to mention HBO's massively successful Last of Us TV show. These movies and shows are often big budget productions starring some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

Looking ahead on the calendar, the list of upcoming video game movies makes it seem like there isn't a single major IP Hollywood isn't interested in adapting for screen.

Anyway, my whole point is, if only Utsumi had pitched a Crash Bandicoot movie in 2025, we might be watching an incredibly uncanny CGI bandicoot on the big screen, nodding our heads in agreement with the movie's 38% Rotten Tomatoes score and being no less surprised that it's the biggest movie of the weekend. Maybe one day.

Weed out the 1993 Mario movies with our guide to the best video game movies ever.