Hollywood's Next Decade Is Being Built From Games
Games had a slow week. The screen business built from games did not. Legendary's Street Fighter film, with Andrew Koji as Ryu, Noah Centineo as Ken and Jason Momoa as Blanka, is in post-production for an October 16 release through Paramount. Amazon's Life is Strange series, produced with Square Enix and Margot Robbie's LuckyChap, starts filming June 29. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Tomb Raider, with Sophie Turner as Lara Croft, shot through the spring. Mass Effect is in development at Amazon. The comic-book decade is quietly becoming the video-game decade.
The reason is a track record that used to be a punchline. The Super Mario Bros. Movie grossed roughly 1.36 billion dollars in 2023 and pushed the Mario film franchise past 2 billion. A Minecraft Movie took nearly a billion in 2025. The three Sonic films have cleared 1.2 billion combined. On television, The Last of Us turned a PlayStation game into a prestige drama, and Fallout did the same for Prime Video. The old curse, that games could not become good films, broke somewhere around 2023 and has not come back.
What changed is who makes them. The new wave runs through producers like Story Kitchen and platform-owned studios like PlayStation Productions, people who treat the source material as a world to honor rather than a logo to slap on a generic script. That is the difference between Sonic the Hedgehog landing and the 1990s Super Mario Bros. movie becoming a cautionary tale. Sydney Sweeney is making a film of the co-op game Split Fiction with director Jon M. Chu. A decade ago that sentence would have been a joke. Now it is a Tuesday.
None of which means every one of these lands. For each The Last of Us there is a forgettable misfire, and a packed adaptation pipeline guarantees some duds. But the center of gravity has moved. If you want to know which stories Hollywood will be telling in 2030, the most reliable place to look is no longer a comic shop or a bestseller list. It is a Steam library.
