We’re almost 30 years removed from Super Mario Bros. marking Hollywood’s first big budget adaptation of a popular video game property, and yet the genre still hasn’t been able to escape accusations of being cursed.
One very recent example is Johannes Roberts’ Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which sank without a trace after bombing at the box office and being panned by critics. The same fate ironically befell Paul W.S. Anderson, who originally launched the Resident Evil franchise with Milla Jovovich two decades ago, when he returned to the console well with Monster Hunter.
Despite scoring some of the best reviews his movies had ever seen, which is an admittedly low bar, Monster Hunter‘s chances of success were cut off at the knees when it was pulled from Chinese theaters less than 48 hours after arriving, when a terrible joke was interpreted as a racial slur, offending an entire nation in the process.
Monster Hunter has continued to play fairly well on streaming throughout the year, though, and that’s still true in the thick of the festive season. As per FlixPatrol, the critical and commercial misfire is currently the seventh most-watched title on HBO Max in the United States, because nothing screams Christmas quite like banal, effects-driven action.