When came out in May, it catapulted to the top of the list of best video game movies with a . Three months later, critics have dethroned it and placed on a dubiously-lofty pedestal, b🌠lowing past its Pokémon-laden competition with a good, if not great,ℱ .
Rotten Tomatoes’ viewer scores and Metacritic’s Metascore also rank the newest Angry Birds movie above Detective Pikachu. The only notable counterpoint to the movie’s victory is the audience polling firm , which gave Detective Pikachu an A- compared to The Angry Birds Movie 2’s B+.
The Angry Birds Movie 2 involves the titular birds teaming up with their enemies, the pigs, after their homes are attacked by Eagle Island using newcomer villain Zeta’s diabolical ice machine. gave the movie 3 out of 5 stars, saying that it’s “more ente꧅rtaining than it has any right or need to be,” and it is “gleefully silly, yet unexpectedly clever.”
A better review score doesn’t mean better ticket sales, however. Detective Pikachu , almost tripling its $150 million production budget. Angry Birds, which no💙 longer holds the b✅rand recognition that it did when its first game was released a decade ago, has so far after a week in theaters, well short of its $65 million budget.
It’s worth noting that Detective Pikachu actually isn’t the highest-grossing video game movie ever made – The 2016 Warcraft film actually than its much-bet🌊ter-reviewed counterpart.
Both Detective Pikachu and Angry Birds 2 are notable for being , meaning that over 60% of critics gave the films a positive review. The other highest-ranking video game movies are 2018’s Rampage and Tomb Raider films, both tied at a 52% Tomatometer rating. These are closely followed by 1995 cult classic Mortal Kombat, which boasts a 46% rating.
With two video game movies in the same year being released to positive regard (if not universal praise), it’s possible that future game-based movies may learn from their examples and fi꧅nally put a stop to the trꦦend of awful adaptations that have plagued video game movies since their inception.