Hollywood’s Weird Deal With Atari Proves Video Game Adaptations Might Be In Trouble

Earlier this month, The Batman screenwriter and Terminator Zero showrunner Mattson Tomlin mentioned on Twitter that he’s received “5x more offers for video game adaptations than comic book adaptations this year,” a statement that makes perfect sense when you look at the release landscape for 2026. So far we’ve already had The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (another billion-dollar smash for Nintendo and Universal Pictures), as well as Mortal Kombat 2 and Iron Lung, Markiplier’s independent horror hit — and there’s still Resident Evil and Street Fighter coming before year’s end. Comic book movies have reigned supreme at the box office for about 20 years now, so they were bound to lose the crown at some point. And while no indisputable succession has happened yet, the writing on the wall says that video games are next up for the throne.

Of course, that depends on whether Hollywood plays the moment right. Even after the genre has proven it can be successful, it still isn’t avoiding fumbles. For every Minecraft Movie, there’s a box-office bomb like 2024’s Borderlands — but in Hollywood’s eyes, the potential earnings far outweigh the risks, and they’re pursuing this trend with a zealousness that suggests the IP recognition is worth more than whether or not the properties they’re adapting are truly suited for the big screen in the first place. The recent Universal/Atari deal, as lucrative as it undoubtedly is, only highlights the issue.

On July 23, Deadline reported that Atari, partnering with production company Entertainment 360, signed a deal with Universal Pictures that grants the studio development rights to 10 classic video game properties. The games are all works from the ‘70s and ‘80s: Pong, Asteroids, Breakout, Missile Command, Yars’ Revenge, Crystal Castles, Adventure, Centipede, and Millipede. The deal apparently came about due to a spec script from the writing duo of Carl Hampe and Matt Reilly (previously a longtime Universal exec); Universal has already bought the undisclosed project, and while there’s every chance it could be a strong screenplay, the games involved all feel too dependent on their original medium to work as films.

Take Pong. Unlike, say, The Last of Us or Fallout, adaptations based on source material that’s already courting cinematic storytelling techniques, Pong has no story to speak of. It’s a virtual approximation of playing tennis, with just two white paddles bouncing a ball back and forth. That’s not to say that some screenwriter can’t come up with a clever premise indebted to the idea, but Pong is the interactive nature of video games boiled down to its purest essence — to add a story, characters, or background lore fundamentally makes it something else.

That’s not to say none of the games being optioned have a narrative. Yars’ Revenge, a fixed shooter made for the Atari 2600 in 1982, has a fairly complex story for its generation (revolving around the interstellar conflict between a fly-like humanoid alien race named the Yars and their enemies the Qotiles), and has received several remakes that deepen or reimagine that lore; there’s enough substance there that it could probably be turned into an animated film that expands on the preexisting framework. But that’s certainly not the case for games like Asteroids or Centipede, which lack any formal plot and would require a level of reinvention that would basically result in a new IP.

This is a particularly prevalent problem for this era of gaming, but it’s an issue that looms over every video game movie or TV series to one degree or another. Even the most narratively dense games are still games — it’s a medium predicated on hands-on player involvement, and that’s a core aspect of how the form tells stories and builds emotional investments. It’s too early to say whether the Atari deal will yield major successes, but from the outside looking in, it appears to be an impossible conundrum. How do you take something designed to be an active artistic experience and make it a passive one without fundamentally changing its core?