To hear some tell it, there's an uncanny darkness that afflicts every movie or series that takes inspiration from a hit video game. This unique enchantment doesn't affect movies based on comics, novels, or even other movies. It's called the "video game curse," and it's always been a lazy way of adding false prestige to the latest work in the genre.
The Last of Us creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have been very clear that they view their take on Naughty Dog's hit zombie survival story as a league above all other video game adaptations. Both fans and creators have described it as a new era for the concept of translating video games into other mediums. Very few people involved in that conversation have bothered to note that it's all been done before.
There is no such thing as the video game movie curse. A lot of movies and TV shows based on video games have been bad, but the fact that people see a pattern in that fact is bizarre. A lot of movies based on books are bad. A lot of movies based on cartoons are bad. A lot of remakes of other movies are bad. A lot of movies that aren't based on anything are bad. None of this represents any kind of statistical likelihood or factual paradigm. One might argue that the balance of good and bad adaptations isn't equal across mediums. Maybe more video game movies are bad than movies based on comics, but the idea that there are no standouts is laughable. The genre is slightly more respectable now than it used to be, but even in the earliest days of adaptations, there were still good video game movies.
In 1994, Gisaburō Sugii and Group TAC released Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. It's an instant classic. Chun-Li kicks Vega through her drywall to his death. Ken drops off Eliza with Alice in Chains blaring on his car speaker. The depiction of Ryu's fight with Sagat is still the go-to look for that key moment in the story. The film sold well enough to land within the top five highest-grossing films of 1994. Arguably, the first video game movie was Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!, released in 1986. That means the first great video game movie to hit the screen came out 8 years after the genre was born. Unfortunately, some people don't see animation as a valid medium.
A lot of people who throw around the term "video game curse" are only interested in live-action adaptations. There are tons of great animated adaptations, many of which are celebrated, but they never seem to be pitched as an end to the curse. Castlevania is one of the most beloved series on Netflix, but it's never talked about other bad video game adaptations. Even if only live-action media is valid, no one ever mentions films like Sonic the Hedgehog or Detective Pikachu. Both of those films are primarily live-action, well-received, and extremely successful. If they don't count as good live-action video game adaptations, it's hard to know what would. Except, through their explanations, it's actually pretty easy to see what "breaking the video game curse" actually means.
There are plenty of good video game adaptations, both animated and live-action, but there's a reason The Last of Us is a specific target for this issue. The kind of person who still believes in a video game curse isn't looking for a good movie or a good show. They're not even looking for a faithful adaptation of something they enjoyed. They're looking for something that will make some imagined wider audience take video games seriously. Nothing that could appeal to kids could fit the bill, because they don't see anything in that catalog as art. Only dark serious prestige television or gritty R-Rated films will justify their desire for prestige. They want to put as much distance as possible between the adaptation and the source material. This ethos imagines a world in which a large percentage of the population thinks that all video games are for kids. It's the same self-destructive impulse that forces comic book movies to keep getting darker. The video game curse isn't about quality, it's about cultural impact.
Video game movies and TV shows are just as likely to be good as any other type of art. There's nothing inherent about the stories in video games that make them incompatible with film. The video game curse is a fake concept that only exists to ignore good art for its audience and celebrate specific examples for their tone. The Last of Us won't break any curse. Neither will the Bioshock movie, the Uncharted movie, or whatever other big-budget take hits the screen next. There's nothing to break. Some video game movies are bad, and others are good. The continued stratification between "kids' stuff" and "real art" only serves to hurt both genres. The curse was broken before anyone even came up with the term.