30 Video Games Made into Movies (For Better or Worse)

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) Dir: John R. Leonetti

Yikes. The original Mortal Kombat holds a score of 33% on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn’t good, but it’s ten times the score that the sequel managed. That’s right, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation holds a whopping 3%. That’s one rotten tomato. Even worse, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon considers the film to the be the “worst moment” in the franchise’s history. Over the years, the film has gained some popularity with the so-bad-it’s-good crowd, but that’s not much of a compliment.

Thanks to die-hard Mortal Kombat fans, the film still managed to pull in $51 million on its $30 million budget, but that’s not exactly a runaway success, and the already-planned sequel was shelved due to the disappointing box office and critical thrashing the film got. It was tinkered with for years, but languished in development hell. In 2009, Linden Ashby claimed that he was reprising his role of Johnny Cage in the third film (despite being recast and killed off in the this film), but nothing ever came of it.

Doom (2005) Dir: Andrzej Bartkowiak

Before he was known the world over as Dwayne Johnson, professional wrestler The Rock headed up this loose adaptation (I feel like I’m going to be using the words loose adaptation a lot) that sees a squad of Marines head to a research facility on Mars to investigate a distress call.

It’s ironic that a man who spent years doing wonderful cinematography work would go on to direct a film with poor cinematography. And that was far from the only problem with Doom, a film many consider to be an uninspired Aliens knock-off. Not only did it fail to garner many positive reviews, it also failed to make its budget back at the box office, cementing its status as a bomb in the worst sense. Luckily for us, it didn’t seem to hurt the careers of Dwayne Johnson or Karl Urban.