Halfway through Season 37, and one thing is becoming pretty obvious: LRF really likes video games right now. Here's The Roundup....
SOUNDTRACKS
Five soundtracks through fifteen films. That’s already enough to make Best Soundtrack one of the more interesting Golden Reel categories this season. And I have it on pretty good authority that we’re not done yet. Three more soundtrack-heavy films are still coming in the second half, which means voters should actually have to make some choices instead of desperately searching for five eligible nominees. Will I personally be voting for all of these Absolutely not. The Silver Swan already tested the limits of how much a cappella I can tolerate in one sitting, and Space Sheriff Helios wasn’t exactly something I’ll be blasting in the car. But that’s almost beside the point. A good awards race should have variety. Different styles. Different genres. Different approaches. Season 37 is definitely giving us that. Now we just need to figure out which ones are actually good.
VIDEO GAME FILMS
Depending on how seriously you want to argue about whether Pokémon counts, we’ve already had three or four video game adaptations this season. And we’re only halfway finished. That’s kind of remarkable. Pokémon was enormous. Metroid Prime made money. Grand Theft Auto IV was respectable. Astro Bot was messy but entertaining. And now Mortal Kombat III has turned into one of the season’s biggest success stories. Oh, and there’s still another Legend of Zelda movie coming.
At this point, video games aren’t some experimental corner of the slate anymore. They’re practically carrying the season. Hollywood spent years trying to figure out how to adapt games without embarrassing itself. LRF seems to have decided the answer was simply: “Make a lot of them.”
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MORTAL KOMBAT III
Talk about an unlikely blockbuster franchise. Think about what Mortal Kombat is working with here. An R rating. Extreme violence. A cast filled with martial arts stars rather than traditional A-listers. A brand that has had a pretty uneven history outside the games. And somehow, three films into LRF’s version, the franchise is bigger than ever. Even better? This is probably the best one.
Gareth Evans understands that nobody buys a ticket to Mortal Kombat hoping for restraint. The action is brutal, the fights are inventive, and the movie embraces the ridiculous mythology instead of acting embarrassed by it. That matters. Too many adaptations spend half their runtime apologizing for the thing they’re adapting.
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FEMALE LRF STARS
LRF has done a pretty good job developing male movie stars. Alden Ehrenreich. Toby Wallace. Joe Keery. There are several actors who arrived as promising talents and gradually became legitimate leading men within the studio. The female side? Much thinner.
Sydney Sweeney is obviously the major success story, and LRF deserves some credit there because it treated her like an A-list star before the rest of Hollywood really did. But after her? The list gets surprisingly short. LRF has certainly tried. Jessie Buckley has gotten opportunities. Chloe Grace Moretz has had major roles. Plenty of talented actresses have been positioned for bigger things. But there haven’t been many cases where the studio clearly created a new female box office draw from the ground up. And The Righteous Path isn’t changing that. Buckley is excellent. She should absolutely keep getting leading roles. But this wasn’t the movie that suddenly turns her into someone audiences rush out to see. The studio needs more than one Sydney Sweeney.
THE RIGHTEOUS PATH
I kept having one thought while watching The Righteous Path: Haven’t I already seen this? Not literally, obviously. But spiritually? Absolutely. Religious community. Woman trapped inside it. Increasing realization that she needs to escape. Oppressive authority figures. A difficult journey toward freedom. We’ve been here before. And LRF itself did it better with Escape back in Season 32. That film, based on Carolyn Jessop’s life, had more urgency, more specificity, and more emotional weight.
The Righteous Path isn’t terrible. That almost makes it more frustrating. Jessie Buckley is good. The movie is competently made. The story functions. It just never gives me a reason why this version needed to exist. If you’re going to revisit familiar material, you need to bring something new. A different perspective. A different structure. A different emotional angle. Something. Instead, this felt like the cinematic equivalent of reheating leftovers. Perfectly edible. Not exactly exciting.
SPACE SHERIFF HELIOS
Who exactly was this movie for? That’s the question I kept coming back to. Space Sheriff has a cult following in Japan. Fine. That could be interesting. But then the movie barely uses the mythology that made the original property distinctive in the first place. So why adapt it? For the title? For the name recognition that most of the target audience probably doesn’t have? Then you build a major release around performers who are talented but largely unknown to Western audiences and expect people to show up based on.... What, exactly? The brand? The cast? The concept? None of them were strong enough selling points. And even if I ignore the commercial side, the movie itself needed far more energy.
This is called Space Sheriff Helios. That title sounds like I should be getting laser guns, ridiculous villains, giant sci-fi spectacle and enough pulp insanity to melt my brain. Instead, I kept waiting for the movie to kick into another gear. It never really did. So yes, the box office failure was predictable. What disappoints me more is that the movie wasn’t weird or exciting enough to become the kind of glorious failure you defend afterward. It just.... flopped.
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