In-depth Look At Game Movies: Double Dragon

We break down this movie adaptation featuring questionable martial arts, a frankly insane plot, what kind of gang Alyssa Milano rolls with, and how you can make a Huey Lewis joke in a 90s videogame movie.

By: Sean Gandert

After the financial, critical, and moral disgrace that was Super Mario Bros., one of the biggest surprises in the industry was how little this prototype for game adaptations deterred anyone else from trying their hands at the genre. Sure, it would be another decade before the true flood of these things hit theaters, but the next year saw the release of a film based on the strongest franchise of the early nineties. That movie… was not Double Dragon, it was Street Fighter, which was released a month later at the height of the series’ popularity. Double Dragon was at that point nearing the end of an inevitable decline, as beat-em-ups in general disappeared from the gaming firmament — little to be seen from again for well more than a decade. The latest Double Dragon game wasn’t even developed by Technos, who created the series, and dropped the classic brawler format entirely in favor of being yet another Street Fighter clone. Unsurprisingly, The Street Fighter movie, like the game, went on to become a huge success while even most fans of video game movies haven’t checked out Double Dragon, which has been out of print for some time (but is still easily available on the Amazon marketplace).