I hate the "It's for the fans!" excuse that I've seen with some recent video game movies

...And when I say that, I'm specifically referring to the Super Mario Bros. and Five Nights at Freddy's films. We've been finally getting good video game adaptations in recent years with the likes of Arcana, Amazon Prime's Fallout, the Sonic movies, etc. However, with The Super Mario Galaxy movie's Rotten Tomatoes score sitting at 45% at the time of this post, I felt like it was worth starting this conversation. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that this movie is still going to make a lot of money, all while a slew of fans will be kissing its feet and pushing back at the detractors with the likes of "But it's faithful to the lore!" or "It wasn't made for casual audiences, IT WAS MADE FOR THE FANS!" Now listen, I'm not some hater that has a personal vendetta against Mario or the Fnaf franchise. I think both have the potential for actual good movies. Instead, my frustration is towards the toxic positivity that these fanbases exude in defending these objectively bad films just because they threw a bunch of memberberries on the screen, all while driving them to become more successful at the box office than some actual good video game movies. For example, The Super Mario Bros. movie alone made more money at the box office than all three Sonic movies combined. This isn't actually because it's a better movie than the Sonic trilogy (all three are unquestionably better films) but because Mario has a larger built-in global fanbase than Sonic (due to the Mario games having a consistently higher quality compared to the mixed output of the Sonic series). There are several reasons why I hate this and why I think it's going to make video game movies worse in the long run. For one, the success of these movies sends the message that the only thing that matters is that the adaptation is faithful, as opposed to being faithful AND good. People make such a big deal out of these adaptations being faithful, when that should be the bare minimum of any adaptation. Just because an adaptation is faithful doesn't automatically mean it's good. Second, an adaptation shouldn't have to use it's source material as a crutch. Again, whenever people say "It's faithful to the lore" or "It's for the fans!", it always comes off as a pathetic excuse. Like I said before, you can be faithful to the source material AND still make a legitimately good film. The biggest problem with both the Super Mario Bros movie and Fnaf 1 and 2 were that they just lazily put together a script with materials from their respective games (even if it doesn't really translate well to film) as well as a few easter eggs and references. Every time I've seen "It's for the fans" used, it's done so to disguise laziness as faithfulness. Lastly, the success of these movies sends the message to Hollywood that they don't have to try. All they have to do is make a movie based on a familiar IP with a large fanbase and hash out a lousy script with a bunch of fan service thrown in. The more audiences lower their standards, the more studios lower their standards. In conclusion, I love video games and I'm glad that we're in an era where the video game movie curse of the past is seemingly coming to an end. However, if the likes of these bad video game movies keep being successful, then I fear that we'll eventually enter another dark age.