Of Mushrooms and Materia: A world of highly regarded and successful video game movies

(This thread inspired by The Power And The Glitter. Insert "clearly this idea belongs in ASB" joke here. :p )

It's a well-known fact that Video Game Movies Suck. As shown in the linked article, the most successful game-based movie in terms of Rotten Tomatoes scores is Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which a) scored only 43% and b) was only spiritually linked to the titular franchise. But was this trope a historical inevitability, or could it have been averted with a bit of luck?

My current idea for a POD is that the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie (the first internationally and theatrically released game-based film, according to Wikipedia) is good enough to turn a large profit and turn studios on to the idea of video game movies as a serious earner. As with other follow-the-leader movements like the various superhero movie surges, this would almost certainly lead to lots of varyingly bad efforts but a few good ones, including perhaps a Final Fantasy movie based directly on one of the more iconic games in the series like IV or VI that would become the genre's equivalent of the 1989 Batman.

(I'm thinking the alternate Mario movie would probably be animated rather than live-action, with a plot based more around the basic idea of the game and perhaps a whimsical, slightly surreal Alice in Wonderland feel to make the strange mix of creatures and things seem reasonable. 1993 was actually a year without a really big Disney animated film (it was between Aladdin and The Lion King), so the Mario movie could easily be the biggest animated feature of the year. The live-action OTL version had a budget of $48 million*, around the same as The Lion King, so one assumes that with good writers a good animated movie could at least theoretically have been made with the same budget.)

As you can see, this is mostly just a concept for a TL at the moment, and I'd be glad of any input, especially from people with more personal experience of the early/mid-90s in video gaming. Suggestions for games of the era that could at least be attempted as decent movies would be most welcome.

*No, I have no idea what they spent that on, based on my viewing of the Nostalgia Critic's review.
 
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