Hollywood has continued to try and turn popular video games into successful movies and thus far there has only been limited success. While some have been winners at the box office, very few have been considered actually good films. However, the newest video game adaptation is apparently the best, at least by one metric as The Angry Birds Movie 2 is officially the best reviewed movie ever based on a game according to Rotten Tomatoes.
The Angry Birds Movie 2 currently sits with a 79% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes which is the best rating of any movie based on a game listed on the site. In fact, the competition isn't even close. The only other game adaptation that is even sitting in positive space is the recent Detective Pikachu that has a 68% score. The next movie on the list is the most recent Tomb Raider adaptation with a 52%
It should be noted, that the average rating for the movie currently sits at 5.63 out of 10, which is just barely into positive territory, so it doesn't look like most reviewers necessarily love The Angry Birds Movie 2, but rather that a larger than usual majority just happen to like it more than they dislike it. Detective Pikachu actually has a slightly better average review score at six out of 10.
It should also be noted that currently the movie only has a handful of reviews, many more are going to be coming this week, but if the first batch has a mostly positive perspective on the film, there's no reason to believe the general consensus won't be pretty close to the same.
For comparison, the first Angry Birds Movie did better than most video game movie adaptations with critics, but still only had a 44% positive rating.
Video games have been tough to adapt into movies because video game stories have been all over the map throughout the decades. While many more recent games have deeply involved narratives, they are largely still secondary to game play, and many don't have much story at all.
In some cases, like The Angry Birds, this opens up the opportunities for creating a story. Since the simple mobile game doesn't have all that much story itself, writers have some freedom to build whatever they want out of the pieces that make up the game. As opposed to something like the newest Tomb Raider, which largely adapted a story from a particular game.
Now that critics have begun to weigh in, we'll have to wait and see how the box office responds. The first Angry Birds Movie grossed over $350 million at the box office despite its less than stellar reviews, so if anything it seems like the more positive notes here might help the sequel do even better.
