If the Silent Hill movie franchise is ever rebooted, the next entry should focus on the second game's Maria. Video game adaptations are usually a recipe for bad cinema, with the genre rarely rising above mediocre. Everything from the 1993 Super Mario Bros to the likes of Dwayne Johnson's Doom have proven disappointing. The Resident Evil movie series has received consistently poor reviews, though the Milla Jovovich-fronted saga is currently the most successful game-to-film adaptation.
The consensus seems to be that 2006's Silent Hill is among the best video game films to date. It's certainly one of the most faithful, with Silent Hill recreating the nightmarish town and its monsters while largely drawing from the story of the first game. The Christophe Gans-directed adaptation was a hit too, and a sequel followed with 2012's Silent Hill: Revelation. Sadly, the follow-up - which pulled from the Silent Hill 3 game - was inferior in every way, offering few scares and telling a story filled with strange plot holes and inconsistencies.
While Silent Hill: Revelation collected largely bad notices from critics, it still earned respectable numbers. Fans of the Silent Hill video game series know all too well that it's on hiatus, and there hasn't been a new sequel since 2012's Silent Hill: Downpour. 2001 video game Silent Hill 2 is not only considered the best in the series but one of the greatest games of all time. Its story, atmosphere, music, themes and more have all been singled out for praise, and the story follows James Sunderland, who travels to the titular town after receiving a letter from his wife. The issue is his wife Mary has been deceased for three years, and when he arrives there, he's besieged by monsters and haunted by Mary's doppelganger Maria - who could be the perfect lead for a new Silent Hill movie.
Silent Hill 2 ultimately revealed James killed his wife out of despair after caring for her through a long period of illness. When the game begins he's suppressed this memory, and the town seemingly conjured Maria from his own memory to torment him. Maria looks almost exactly like Mary but acts in a more confident and sexualized way. While followers of the series might want a direct adaptation of Silent Hill 2, that approach wouldn't work. The alchemy that makes the sequel work so well would be hard to recapture in game form, let alone in a movie, and its big twists have been long spoilt.
Instead, Silent Hill's Maria should front the next entry. Maria is one of Silent Hill's most iconic characters and possibly its most tragic. The sub-game "Born From A Wish" reveals her origin, which is being conjured up by the town when James arrives and being filled with a sense of isolation and loneliness until she seeks him out. She's been created to taunt and test him, and despite being a sentient being with thoughts, feelings and scattered memories of Mary's life, she's routinely killed just to teach James a lesson.
Instead of a straight Silent Hill 2 movie adaptation, the series could build off of "Born From A Wish" and show the story from Maria's perspective instead. As a creation of the town, she can be both the hero and anti-hero of the story, but she can also break away from the function of being a tragic Silent Hill 2 character and get her own agency. Silent Hill's Maria is one of the most complex and intriguing figures of the series, and a movie could be a good chance to flesh her out even more.