The decision to make a movie out of a game has to be about more than money.
Rockstar Games co-founder and VP of creativity, Dan Houser, seemingly isn’t a particularly big fan of the fusion of videogames and movies. Whether it’s a big screen adaptation of a successful game, or the tie-in game for a successful movie, Houser feels that too often, people are just out to make a quick buck, rather than a good product.
Houser thought that the motivation for making taking a game and making it into a movie – or vice versa – had to be more than financial. Moreover, he thought that not every property would work in a new medium, so it was important for filmmakers and developers to make sensible choices about what they were going to work on. “If [they] feel the property has something about it that is universal or could work in another medium … then that is something worthwhile,” he said.
When it came to movies based on Rockstar properties like Red Dead Redemption or the Grand Theft Auto games, Houser said that the studio had looked into a number of different deals, but so far had decided not to proceed with any of them. He said that if Rockstar made a movie, it would either be with top Hollywood talent, or else it would make it itself, so that if it was bad, the studio would know that it had “failed on [its] own terms.” Unfortunately for anyone hoping to see Vice City: The Movie or something similar, Houser said that making games took too much of Rockstar’s time for it to think about the silver screen just yet.
It would interesting to see how a Rockstar themed movie would work, especially when you consider how much inspiration Rockstar games draw from movies. Houser has said in the past, however, that squeezing a Rockstar game into a two hour movie just wouldn’t work, so maybe if the studio does make a movie in the future, it would be less GTA IV and more Ballad of Gay Tony.
Source: THR
