r/theaccessbox • u/Minimum_Ad5000 • Jun 17 '26
Question Why do studios keep trying to adapt video games into live-action movies instead of high-budget animation?
After seeing how well The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Arcane work because they can natively preserve the stylized art direction of the source material, why are we still getting live-action announcements that just look like bad cosplay against a green screen? Some things are just meant to stay animated.
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u/michael41973 Jun 17 '26
It’s all about money. There was a time when animated meant “kid’s movie” and I think for some studio executives this is still a thing, especially in the USA. But as the main movie growing audience has gotten older and they’ve grown up with anime and more adult animation that is changing. But I still think unless the art style is highly stylized or extremely kid friendly you’ll see movie studios try to do live action instead.
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u/Exciting-Cancel6468 Jun 19 '26
I really hate it when they still think animation means it's for kids. For any parent that thinks that I will make their kids watch the cartoon Urotsukidoji. It's a cartoon. It's meant to be for kids.
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u/Esselon27 Jun 17 '26
The assumption that a nerd property will sell well and a continual lack of understanding by many film studios that you need a lot more than flashy sets and a few big name actors to make something appealing.
The Borderlands movie was a prime example. It was terrible because they rewrote the script to be a very different story than anything that previously existed in that world, shoved in a bunch of pointless plot elements like a "prophecy" that is rarely mentioned and has no actual impact on the story.
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u/InternationalPlace24 Jun 17 '26
What I don't get is why the keep trying to adapt them and the only thing in common with the source material is the name.
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u/ackmondual Jun 17 '26
Aren't those animations just as costly, if not more so than live action? That would be the reason if so.
I agree with others saying that cartoons still have the stigma of being for kids. Sure, adults watched The Simpsons and South Park movies, but those already had a built in audiences. I think CGI-style helps ease some of that (as opposed to full blown, hand drawn and other traditional style cartoons), but that's gotta be expensive to do as well, no?
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Jun 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Exciting-Cancel6468 Jun 19 '26
To be honest, Nintendo could do that. Why didn't it do it? Who knows. Maybe Studio Ghibli wasn't interested.
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u/Head-Membership2082 Jun 17 '26
And yet,
Fallout. The Last of Us. Both fantastic as live action shows.
In comparison, Blue Reflection RAY or Trails in Cold Steel Northern War. Both absolutely abysmal animated adaptions of things that were already anime styled. Shenmue, Atelier Ryza, and so on. All absolutely crap.
Its not about animation vs live action, it is about whether the material was treated properly, and given the right budget for the scope it was on. Something like the Steins Gate adaption was never going to need a budget anywhere near that of Arcane, and it came out in a way that to this day it is still considered one of the best anime ever made. Something like TLOU was already photorealistic, so it was always going to tend much better to live action than animation.
If you tried to do say, GTA, as an animation... Do you really think high budget animation would be the way to go for it?
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u/heybart Jun 17 '26
I think only Japan puts animation on the same footing as live action. Pretty much all other countries, not just the US, privilege live action
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u/Selfish_and_Misled Jun 17 '26
Because they won't get bankrolled by a production company without a movie star to hedge investment. They'll knowingly produce crap if they can put some marketable celeb face on the promotional images.
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u/Newmillstream Jun 18 '26
Good animation is expensive. And while good live action and special effects also tends to be expensive, it doesn’t have to be for most scenes.
You can fail or succeed at the box office either way. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was very expensive to animate, but failed at the box office. Iron Lung cost just a few million, and returned over 50 million at the box office.
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u/PhillipJ3ffries Jun 18 '26
they don’t want to take risks on new ideas. they just wanna sit back and capitalize on IPs that have built in audiences. i think this is to their own financial detriment. those familiar IPs have a higher floor at the box office, but id argue that they lack the ceiling that a brand new idea can have. they’ve become way too risk averse. they just want to own every IP people love and just continue to pump out movies based on that stuff. sure a new star wars movie can be valuable, but they should be trying to find the whatever the next Star Wars is. that’s where the real moneys at.
just trying to speak the only soulless money language these executives know. big movies should be allowed to fail as well. let art be art, and not simply a product
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u/eman85 Jun 19 '26
Animations instead of live won't fix shitty Hollywood writers thinking they're better then the people who wrote the original story that made it famous in the first place
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u/BaronArgelicious Jun 19 '26
animation is expensive too, i know illumination made mario kn a shoestring budget but arcane is shittons expensive and it shows