Rockstar Games co-founder and former head writer Dan Houser said a Grand Theft Auto movie “never made sense.”
As reported by GI.biz, Houser told The Ankler that making the film – which has fallen into obscurity over the years – was a “huge risk” given the reputation of the GTA brand.
“Why would we do this?” Houser and other Rockstar executives asked the film executives. “What you’ve described is that you’re making a movie and we have no control and are taking a huge risk, that we’re going to end up paying for with something that’s ours.”
“They thought we would be blinded by the lights and that just wasn’t the case. We had what we considered to be multi-billion dollar intellectual property, and the economics never made sense. Risk never made sense. At that time, the perception was that games produced poor quality films.
Various concepts for a GTA movie have waxed and waned over the years, including one featuring Eminem, although Rockstar remained staunchly opposed to it. This comes despite movie stars like Jack Black unable to believe that GTA and Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption franchise haven’t been made into films amid the rise of video game adaptations such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Minecraft, Borderlands, and more.
The CEO of parent company Rockstar, Strauss Zelnick of Take-Two Interactive, made a similar comment to Houser in 2019. “Part of it is that if we were to do something like this, we would want to have complete creative control to make sure that we expressed (GTA) the way we wanted – and that would mean we had to finance this movie,” Zelnick said at the time.
GTA of course makes a lot of money by sticking to its video game roots. Grand Theft Auto 5 generated over $1 billion within three days of its launch in 2013, a figure that will likely be blown out of the water when Grand Theft Auto 6 releases in fall 2025.
The GTA 6 trailer – which reintroduced fans to Rockstar’s take on Miami, Vice City – featured a ton of intricate details (here are 99 things spotted by IGN) and plenty of references to wild and wacky real-life events. While the game was revealed as a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S game, PC gamers were frustrated, but not necessarily surprised, that their platform was excluded from the list.
They weren’t the ones who were a little peeved, as several developers from Rockstar itself took to social media to express their frustration over the trailer’s early leak. In fact, the entire industry shared its disappointment that the exciting moment was muted. Several streamers also faced content strikes and takedowns following the leak.
Regardless, it still surpassed Minecraft to become the second most-watched video game trailer of all time with over 168 million views in the first three months.
Ryan Dinsdale is a freelance journalist for IGN. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
News Source : www.ign.com
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