- Spanning over 23 countries, including the UK, Tomb Raider (2018) is the world’s most popular action/adventure-based video game movie game.
- In joint second place is martial arts classic Mortal Kombat (1995) and monster film Monster Hunter – both scoring high search volumes in 18 countries, with Mortal Kombat amassing over 209,000 searches a month.
- Resident Evil (2002) accrued the second-highest search volume, despite being the most popular in only 10
It’s no secret that video games are growing in popularity, with an estimated 3.24 billion players globally last year.
Nintendo was the first to marry the video game and movie concept, with Super Mario Bros proving to be a revelation! Since then, over 49 video games have made their move to the big screen.
Eager to see which video game movies are most popular worldwide, Bestcasinosites.net collated Google search volumes from the most notable movies across 166 countries, to find out which are being searched the most.
Please see here for full study.
RESULTS:
- A firm favourite across 23 countries, including the UK, is Tomb Raider (2018), securing the title for the most popular video game movie globally. This action-adventure favourite averaged over 91,930 monthly search volumes collectively worldwide and earned a 53% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
- Drawing in second place are Mortal Kombat (1995) and Monster Hunter, with 18 countries including the US choosing Mortal Kombat as their favourite, with a staggering 209,880 search results. Interestingly, although Tomb Raider (2018) has more widespread appeal, the original Mortal Kombat generated higher search volumes globally. It has drawn with Monster Hunter, which has earned 104,100 monthly searches.
- In third place, 15 countries chose Hitman: Agent 47, with 109,030 search volumes, just above Monster Hunter. However, it scored just 8% Critic Rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but 40% with the audience, so why did the audience like it more than the critics?
Aiden Howe, the editor of BestCasinoSites, provided his expertise on why some movies perform better than others:
“It’s interesting how a movie that is an instant win with the critics and audience sometimes won’t perform well at the box office. Some movies were considered “too ahead of their time” or didn’t have a high enough publicity budget to deliver.
Similarly, movies like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time weren’t favoured by critics and the public, but they made the studio a lot in return. It could be down to this being the first movie in a series, the inclusion of a high-profile actor, or that movies like this are so bad, people are looking for a humour-filled two hours”.
Each continent’s favourite video game movie:
| Continent | Video Game Movie | Average Monthly Search Volumes | Country with Highest Number of Searches |
| North America | Mortal Kombat (1995) | 2,000 | US (109,000) |
| Europe | Tomb Raider (2018) | 1,100 | UK (12,000) |
| South America | Mortal Kombat (1995) | 1,800 | Brazil (7,800) |
| Oceania | Mortal Kombat (1995) | 1,900 | Australia (6,700) |
| Africa | Need For Speed | 1,700 | South Africa (3,000) |
| Asia | Hitman: Agent 47 | 1,800 | India (28,000) |
To see a complete breakdown of all data used in this study, you can go here:
We really hope you find this data useful, if you choose to use it, we would very much appreciate a link to BestCasinoSites.net who conducted the research. A link credit allows us to provide you with more content, which we’re sure you find useful.
Methodology:
BestCasinoSites.net sought to find out the most popular video game movies around the world.
- To do this, BestCasinosites.net utilised Rotten Tomatoes’ ‘49 video game movies ranked by Tomatometer’ as a suitable seed list.
- Titles released within the last 12 months were omitted from the study to avoid unfair search rankings due to popularity.
- BestCasinosites.net used Ahrefs to collate search volumes for every country (on average per month) by scraping data for each movie.
- Care was taken to translate each search query, but most queries didn’t return any results, so most are in their English counterparts.
- Search volume data for every country was recorded to determine every country’s favourite. All data was ranked.
- Dominica, Djibouti, Andorra, Bermuda, Samoa, American Samoa, Greenland, Benin, Jersey, Guernsey and Gibraltar were excluded from the study due to having zero search results.
- All data was collected on the 22nd June 2022 and is subject to change.
