Few film formats have as weak a reputation as video game adaptations. Famous for critical failures like Street Fighter and Resident Evil, even veteran film-maker Mike Newell failed to give a magic touch to 2010’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Most video game movies bombed at the box office and, as we have reported, one of the brightest spots in recent years has been Pokémon Detective Pikachu. That is, until the pandemic.
By the time theaters re-opened from lockdown their usual clientele had become more discerning. Not only had streaming made it much easier to watch new releases but viewers were more cautious about being in confined spaces and had less money in their pockets thanks to rising inflation. However, one demographic remained loyal.
The cost of living crisis combined with the pandemic put theme park visits and other day trips out of reach for many families with young children. Theaters filled that gap and this gave video game adaptations a new lease of life.
With its release in February 2020, Sonic the Hedgehog was one of the last big budget movies before the curtain temporarily came down on theaters. It stuck in movie-goers’ minds so much that it spawned a sequel two years later and this did so well that a third is due to debut next month. Proof that this wasn’t a flash in the pan came when The Super Mario Bros. Movie became last year’s second-highest grossing movie with a gross of $1.4 billion and a 95% audience score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It showed that video game adaptations had finally come of age and this wasn’t just limited to movies.
In November 2021 Netflix unleashed an adult animated steampunk action-adventure series with the anonymous-sounding name of Arcane. Set against the bleak backdrop of escalating unrest between the rich, utopian city of Piltover and the seedy, oppressed underbelly of Zaun, the series focuses on sisters Vi and Jinx who find themselves in conflict over clashing convictions and arcane technologies, hence the show’s name.
Produced by French animation studio Fortiche, it was not strictly a video game adaptation but was set in the universe of the online multiplayer battle arena game League of Legends and was made under the supervision of its developer Riot Games. Its attention to detail made all the difference.
The first season was released to almost universal acclaim with fans praising its pacing, story, characters, action sequences, animation and worldbuilding which has a simple enough structure to draw in new viewers whilst being filled with Easter eggs for fervent fans of the game. It set the record as Netflix’s highest-rated series at the time and, within a week of its premiere, ranked first on the streamer’s Top 10 Chart in 52 countries.
Audiences awarded it a staggering 97% on Rotten Tomatoes with critics going even further by giving it a perfect score. Testimony to this, the year after it was released it became the first streaming series to win the Outstanding Animated Program Primetime Emmy Award and also swept the board with nine wins at the Annies, the animation industry’s equivalent of the Oscars.
Arcane’s second and final season debuted earlier this month to similarly rave reviews. Its audience score slightly dipped to 93%, due to mixed reviews of its pacing, though critics gave it 100% again. It isn’t the only series to earn this accolade. In fact, in just the past few days Netflix has added Pantheon, an adult animated sci-fi series from 2022 that also boasts a 100% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. However, the power of Arcane can be seen most clearly when comparing how many articles have mentioned it this year with the number about the other four new adult animated shows announced by Netflix in June.
As the graph above shows, Arcane has been mentioned in 2,494 articles which is more than the combined total for the other four shows, including the highly-anticipated Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft.
The data comes from Factiva, a media search engine owned by Dow Jones which includes content from 33,000 news, data and information sources in 32 languages from 200 countries. Factiva’s archive is constantly updated and contains more than two billion articles with the oldest dating back to 1944. They were searched over the past year for the name of the show with Netflix to ensure it excluded any irrelevant coverage.
So many articles have been written about Arcane in 2024 that in the week of its release it was in third place when compared with the tallies for each of the top five Netflix English TV shows. The coverage steadily built up throughout the year, increasing exponentially from August as shown in the graph below.
Its success set the scene for the development of Secret Level, another adult animated series based on video games. The anthology comprises original stories set within the worlds of some of the most beloved video games such as PAC-MAN and God Of War. Even though there is little more than two weeks until the show launches on Amazon Prime, it has only been mentioned in 926 articles so far this year. By the same time ahead of its release Arcane had almost double the number of mentions again showing that it really is in a league of its own.
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