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Movies adapted from video games have shed their reputation for being low-quality, box office failures. With The Super Mario Galaxy Movie becoming one of 2026’s highest earners and Mortal Kombat II poised for success in the summer, video games may have surpassed their traditional counterparts. This leaves films based on action figures struggling to find their place in Hollywood’s endless pursuit of intellectual property adaptations.
While video game films have not yet reached the financial heights of the Transformers franchise, which has produced eight films, several of which crossed the billion-dollar mark globally, they are gaining ground. The animated spinoff, Transformers One, received positive reviews but failed to match its predecessors’ box office success, overshadowed by The Wild Robot. It seems a Transformers film achieving the kind of success Super Mario has enjoyed is still a distant dream. Beyond Hasbro’s flagship series, the outlook is even more grim. Their most successful adaptation has been a Dungeons & Dragons film—a property they acquired rather than originated. Attempts to revive the live-action G.I. Joe series with 2021’s Snake Eyes were unsuccessful. This action flick, which details the origin of the silent commando previously portrayed by Ray Park in G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra and G.I. Joe: Retaliation, failed to capture significant box office revenue, collectively earning nearly $700 million globally.
On a starkly lower note, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins struggled even more, grossing only $40 million worldwide. To put this in perspective, the earlier Cage-led Snake Eyes made a higher box office return in the U.S. alone more than two decades prior. Perhaps without the pandemic’s impact, it might have performed a bit better, but it underscored the lack of demand for such brand extensions in theaters.
Interestingly, streaming has provided a different narrative. Snake Eyes found a new audience on Netflix, where it climbed into the platform’s Top 10 for over a week, suggesting a growing interest. Surprisingly, the film might actually warrant this newfound attention.
It’s easy to see why a prequel from a stalled 2010s film series, based on 1980s action figures, didn’t thrive in theaters. The movie delivers precisely what its title, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, suggests. However, it diverges from the earlier G.I. Joe films in both style and substance, functioning effectively as a standalone, big-budget ninja action flick. Henry Golding stars as Snake Eyes, driven by a quest for his father’s killer, leading him to the Yakuza and subsequently a ninja clan. The film is essentially a series of transitions from crime-fighting to ninja training, heists, and epic battles.
Director Robert Schwentke, who has made a number of unremarkable action movies, does a few simple, maybe even cheap things in putting all this together. First, he lights the hell out of it. The movie is saturated with green neon highlights, faces that glow orange-yellow, mystical gems that glow red in lantern-lit hallways, rich black shadows, and cool backlighting; it’s slickly stylish in a way that used to be pretty standard for this scale of action wannabe blockbuster, but has long since been muted into grayish muck by some of the most supposedly colorful film franchises around. Schwentke also uses a ton of handheld camera, another technique that was once trendy bordering on vexing, but here gives the early scenes especially a sense of urgency and motion that papers over action choreo that’s cool, but not quite John Wick level. It’s not even quite at the Ballerina level of hot people kicking ass, the welcome presence of Samara Weaving in a supporting role notwithstanding (in a bit of casting that someone, somewhere, almost certainly thought of as a possible seed for another spinoff).
So basically, yes, cheap tricks abound: color and whooshing and Samara Weaving. But the movie is refreshingly non-jokey about its own silliness; it lets the silliness breathe. Also, Snake Eyes does, at one point, fight a trio of gigantic snakes. That’s the kind of CG overkill I can get behind. It’s better than other action-figure movies (unless you count Toy Story) and better than a lot of video game movies, too. It captures the aesthetic pleasure of both: the stylized glow of games, the posable impossibility of figures doing their little imaginary ninja tricks. Maybe this movie’s destiny was to be watched from the floors of living rooms everywhere.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
Stream Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins on Netflix