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3. Sim-City. Ok let’s start thinking outside the box a bit. If they can have movies based on apps, and movies based on rides at Disney World, why can’t they have a movie based on a one player simulation video game?

The Sim-City series was wildly popular and spanned, Hollywood style, dozens of sequels, spin-offs, and prequels.

The plot in this one would be easy, it basically writes itself. The unknown Mayor of Cityland begins developing a small enclave in a mostly level terrain that is water adjacent. As successive generations pass, the Mayor somehow continues to live on. At first, the plot centers around the complicated decisions required to get the city to grow on a small budget—and you can’t click the fast forward button against time, either.

But, the fun will really begin when the city has turned into a megalopolis with skyscrapers, and disasters begin to befall it. Fires and tornados at first, and maybe even a meltdown of one of the old coal plants. The real tragedy will strike, however, when they have a monster come through and wreak havoc through the streets.

Come to think of it, they’ve made this movie already many times—it’s called Godzilla, but here you’d also get the back story of how the city got built in the first place. Nerds, at least, will love it.

2. Dr. Mario or Tetris. So let’s move from outside the box into the rectangle. I’m not sure exactly what the plot of this one would be but the effects would be wondrous.

Dr. Mario is perhaps most conducive to adaptation because you can have the title doctor fighting increasingly more dense populations of three-color viruses. Again, this move has been made before, most recently by Sodebergh in Contagioin.

Here, of course, the stakes aren’t as high, it’s simply mass suffocation by pill obstruction. Perhaps the little rectangle in the video game, shaped like a pill bottle, was really a metaphor for your trachea?

Either way, the hero saves the day by dexterous handling of the remote and nifty finger work.

Ok, perhaps this one wasn’t the most well-conceived of the ideas. I bit they could make it happen still though. Just turn the viruses into characters and viola.

1. Super Mario Kart. But the video game I’d most like to see turned into a movie is undoubtedly Super Mario Kart and all the series that it engendered.

Again, this movie has been done several dozen times already—car racing movies abound. But think of how much more fun it will be if the drivers are Princess Toadstool instead of Daniel Bruhl, or Wario instead of Chris Hemsworth.

Better yet, think of the sets again! If Ninja Gaiden had cinematographic promise, Mario Kart augurs Oscar gold for the set decorators, the sound mixers, and the visual effect artists. You’d have to go into the varied and complex sets in the game from Princess Toadstool’s castle, to a Ghost House, to the even more elaborate and complex settings in later versions.

The best part, of course, will be having the characters throw shells, banana peels, and an evilly destructive blue shell that chases the leader. That’s without even talking the fearsome lightning bolt that can be used!

And, since in later iterations you could have two characters in one car, think again of how much better that will be than the plain old, boring, linear races that we have grown accustomed to seeing?

Step it up, Hollywood.

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