According to the experts at Rotten Tomatoes, The Angry Birds Movie 2 is on track to become the highest-rated video game movie on the review site. The first Angry Birds Movie came out in 2016 and boasted an all-star voice cast featuring the likes of Jason Sudeikis, Peter Dinklage, Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader. Based on Rovio Entertainment’s smartphone game, the film focused on the ongoing war between the angry birds of the title and their mortal enemies – a horde of evil green-colored pigs.

Though The Angry Birds Movie wasn’t highly rated by critics it was a hit at the box office and raked in over $352 million worldwide. Thanks to its impressive box office performance, a sequel was quickly greenlit and released in the UK and Ireland last weekend. To everybody’s surprise early reviews for The Angry Birds Movie 2 were actually full of praise for the sequel and agreed it was a massive improvement on its predecessor. Given how derided the video game movie genre is – and the critics’ opinion of the first Angry Birds Movie – it’s an impressive achievement.

Yesterday, Rotten Tomatoes tweeted that reviews collated so far for The Angry Birds Movie 2 ranked the sequel at an impressive 81% on the Tomatometer. Since then it’s actually crept up to 82% which is almost double the first film’s rather middling score of 44%. Check out Rotten Tomatoes’ tweet below:

As for how the sequel’s Tomatometer rating compares to other similar movies, Rotten Tomatoes recently published a list ranking a total of 41 films from the video game movie genres. Sitting at the bottom of the list with pitiful ratings of under 10% are films like Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li but even the more highly ranked movies aren’t all that highly rated. Ranking within the top ten are films including Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (37%), Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (38%) and the first Angry Birds Movie at 44% whose low scores give an indication of how poorly received video game movies generally are.

If the great reviews continue for The Angry Birds Movie 2 and it manages to maintain its current high Tomatometer rating, it could officially knock Detective Pikachu – which has a 68% rating – off the top spot. As one of the few highly rated films of its type, Detective Pikachu is an interesting example of the video game movie. It’s already one of the highest-grossing films of 2019 and currently ranks as the second highest-grossing video game movie of all time after making just over $431 million worldwide. It makes you wonder whether the likes of Detective Pikachu and The Angry Birds Movie 2 could be the start of an upturn in quality for the video game movie genre.

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Source: Rotten Tomatoes

  • Angry Birds 2 Release Date: 2019-08-13