There is a lot of talk these days about how at last, Hollywood seems to have broken the video game adaptation “curse,” where previously nearly all projects were either bad or disastrous. That changed in the era of Arcane, Fallout, The Last of Us, Sonic, Mario and more, but today? We have a flashback.
Return to Silent Hill, out this weekend, just landed a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes. That is a 6 with no other numbers. Literally a 6%. It’s a flashback to an era of truly awful video game movies, one that is up there, or down there, with the likes of Uwe Boll classics.
This is not just bad, it’s almost historically bad. It is now the sixth-worst video game movie adaptation of all time, and the worst scored since 2007’s In The Name of the King. The only other movie within the last decade on the top 20 list is 2024’s Borderlands. And here is that top 20 list, for reference:
- Alone in the Dark (2005) – 1%
- House of the Dead (2003) – 3%
- BloodRayne (2005) – 4%
- Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) – 4%
- In the Name of the King (2007) – 4%
- Return to Silent Hill (2026) – 6%
- Silent Hill Revelation (2012) – 8%
- Postal (2007) – 9%
- Borderlands (2024) – 10%
- Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009) – 10%
- Tekken (2010) – 11%
- Street Fighter (1994) – 11%
- Double Dragon (1994) – 12%
- Hitman: Agent 47 (2015) – 13%
- Super Mario Bros. (1993) – 13%
- Wing Commander (1999) – 15%
- Max Payne (2008) – 16%
- Hitman (2007) – 16%
- DOA: Dead or Alive (2006) – 18%
- Resident Evil Apocalypse (2004) – 18%
- Assassin’s Creed (2016) – 19%
The main “slop” era here was between about 2003 and 2007, where some of the worst entries appeared. A number of fighting game movies, almost all of them, really, have not translated well to screen, but that trend changed with 2021’s Mortal Kombat, which had an 85% audience score (and a 55% critic score).
There are two Silent Hill movies here, leaving out the third, which at least had a 33% critic score (good in context, I suppose) and a 63% audience score. This was in the 2006 garbage era, but I remember actually liking it. Interestingly, only one of the eight Resident Evil movies made this top 20 list, though literally all of them range from 18% to 37%, at best.
What happened with Return to Silent Hill? It is the director of the original Silent Hill, Christophe Gans, although it has been 20 years since that movie, and he has only directed one movie since, Beauty and the Beast. No, not the Emma Watson one, the Vincent Cassel and Lea Seydoux one I didn’t know existed until right now, back in 2014.
The cast? I’ve simply never heard of a single one of them. It stands to reason that Return to Silent Hill is in for a brutal box office beating this weekend, even as it is competing with something like Chris Pratt’s 17% rated Mercy. I would be shocked if it even made the top 5 for the weekend. We’ll see.
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