Has the video game movie curse final­ly been lifted?

For years now, it’s been con­ven­tion­al indus­try wis­dom that movies based on video games just don’t work. For what­ev­er rea­son – los­ing the abil­i­ty to con­trol the actions of the char­ac­ters onscreen, an inabil­i­ty to repro­duce the ful­ly-dig­i­tal aes­thet­ic of the lat­est con­sole – some­thing was always lost in trans­la­tion, and the box-office returns suf­fered for it.

From the cat­a­stroph­ic Super Mario Bros. movie that set the whole move­ment in motion to Warn­er Bros’ calami­tous effort to bring Tekken to the sil­ver screen, mon­ey kept van­ish­ing as if flushed down the toi­let. Even those that sur­vived on the finan­cial lev­el – the Ali­cia Vikan­der-led Tomb Raider, the Jake Gyl­len­haal vehi­cle Prince of Per­sia, the big-bud­get War­craft project – amassed dis­mal spates of reviews. The flops con­tin­ued to pile up, but Hol­ly­wood remained unde­terred, and it’s start­ing to look like they were right to stay the course.

This week­end, Son­ic the Hedgehog’s big-screen debut opened to a healthy box-office haul, tak­ing $111 mil­lion world­wide over the first few days of its the­atri­cal release. Kids movies tend to hold, too, behold­en less to buzz cycles and more to par­ents need­ing to kill an after­noon. In all like­li­hood, it’ll end up as one of the year’s major tick­et-sale victors.

This comes hot on the heels of the glob­al suc­cess of Detec­tive Pikachu, a phe­nom­e­non that hoard­ed a whop­ping $433 mil­lion world­wide. Of course, that release had a mas­sive built-in audi­ence the likes of which no oth­er video game prop­er­ty cur­rent­ly enjoys, but the proof that this can work was right there in the pudding.

Or at least, that’s what stu­dio exec­u­tives are hop­ing right now. Sony has already put treat­ments of block­bust­ing games Mon­ster Hunter and Unchart­ed in motion, while Warn­er Bros. read­ies a new reboot of the Mor­tal Kom­bat mythos and a Minecraft movie far­ther down the line. The stu­dios will feed any avail­able scrap of IP into the great tent­pole fur­nace, and because there are only so many Dis­ney clas­sics to be remade and super­hero comics to be adapt­ed, video games may be the way forward.