Broadway musicals, universal monster movies, westerns, adaptations of comic books, romance novels and noirs — there are a ton of genres and archetypes that pop culture has consistently been mining from. And now, one of my all-time favorite things on planet earth, the "Fallout" games, are getting a bloated and expensive TV show on Amazon, the website that sells you toilet paper. what has become of our medium, our art form?

Back in 2002, when Sam Raimi made "Spider-Man," which turned out to be a colossal blockbuster and a critical smash hit, it modernized superhero movies and took then a level up from from what were considered the genre's tentpoles, like the '70s "Superman" and Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman."

Then we had twenty years of ups and downs, and it seems like we're slowly getting to the point of diminishing returns ever since with our comics' heroes. Great things can still be made, and will be, but it seems like we've finally grown out of the golden age of comics adaptations — and the next era is already upon us. Guess what has never had a golden age of adaptations to live action filmmaking of any kind? Video games.

I think we can all agree, more or less, that Hollywood has been quite terrible when it comes to adapting video games, and has been now for so long that it almost seems inevitable that studios will mess something up when given the chance.

The '90s really set off some early misses with a legacy of crap, like 1993s "Super Mario Bros.," followed by "Double Dragon" (1994) and "Street Fighter" (1994) — these films are such a low blow to anyone with eyeballs, it really set the tone for how video games should not be brought to life on the big (or small) screen. Don't get me started on anything Uwe Boll touched or that "Doom" movie my dad took me to go see in theaters.

While I like that first "Mortal Kombat" movie, which released in 1995, its sequel, which released in 2021, is among the worst flims ever made, and I'm not going to throw Rotten Tomatoes scores or box office returns in anyones face because I don't need to. There was a bit more effort over the next decade, and after some slightly better attempts in the early 2000s with "Tomb Raider" (2001) and Resident Evil" (2002) it took until the 2010s for a new crop of modern franchises to take a swing at attracting fans.

But still, the idea of trying to make a cinematic story out of games that were so light on it to begin with, coupled with the poor execution, really showcased the need to stop this. Movies like "Hitman" (2007), "Prince of Persia," (2010), "Need for Speed," (2014), "Warcraft" (2016) and "Assassin's Creed" (2016) were all panned by critics and audiences alike. No one talks about them because they are forgettable IP cash-grabs that simply reek of soulless productions grasping at straws.

But I can hear you screaming right now: But wait! Hollywood finally nailed it! What about all the recent good ones?

And yes, it seems like we've turned a corner. "Detective Pikachu" (2019), "Sonic the Hedgehog" (2020), "Uncharted" (2022) and the most recent "Super Mario Bros." (2023) movie were fine, good even. They turned out to be successful money makers that delighted children around the world. I want more good things like this to happen, I really do! I do not want to be a stick in the mud, I want to be an optimist! But I can't, I cannot keep lying to myself.

"Halo" (2022) and "Resident Evil" series will be the norm, and "The Last of Us" (2023) will be the exception. Taking an already TV show-esque game that was episodically set up, not changing the script and having the original writer adapt it is best case scenario. Anything else is going to suffer from the same fate that Mario's original movie did, but with a bigger budget and more pissed off fans. "The Last of Us" is the first prestige TV show based off of a video game that's exceeded expectations — and I fear it'll be the last.