While 2023 was certainly a great year for movies and TV shows as a whole (unless you're the Marvel Cinematic Universe), it was an especially great year for adaptations of our favorite video game franchises. As a prime example, Nintendo and Illumination Studios' The Super Mario Bros. Movie hit theaters in April. It was hard to know if the movie was going to work, as even the casting of Chris Pratt stirred disdain among fans. Would they be willing to watch Super Mario on the big screen?

It turns out, they absolutely would. The Super Mario Bros. Movie would earn more than $1.3 billion at the box office, becoming the third-biggest animated feature ever--behind Disney's Lion King remake and Frozen II. It's also the highest-grossing video game movie of all time, and the second-biggest movie of 2023, domestically and worldwide. That's a pretty dramatic change, compared to previous years.

"I think that part of the problem with translating games to movies is that the structure of what makes a good game is very different from the structure of what makes a good movie," Super Mario and Legend of Zelda creator and all-around video game icon Shigeru Miyamoto said back in 2007, after years of bad adaptations that included 1993's Super Mario Bros.