The Grand Theft Auto franchise has never received a movie transposition, despite being one of the most commercially successful intellectual property in the history of entertainment.
The Grand Theft Auto franchise has never received a movie transposition, despite being one of the most commercially successful intellectual property in the history of entertainment.
In an interview with The Wrap, Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the series and Rockstar Games owner, has shared why the label has never tried to land a deal for a GTA movie tie-in, which – considering the fame of the brand could prove a profitable operation.
Should a GTA movie ever happen, “We’d want to have complete creative control to make sure we expressed it the way we wanted,” CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed, and that’s something that no major movie production house which approached the publisher in the past has been granted.
Zelnick acknowledged that, when you want “complete creative control,” you might be forced to fund the project by yourself.
He further added that the resources are there and available aplenty but “we don’t have the corporate expertise to do it,” he reckoned, as only a limited number of executives at the company have worked on movies in the past, and that could represent a risk in terms of quality of the final product.
Movies based on video games are a delicate matter nowadays. What looks to be a promising production such as Sonic the Hedgehog has turned out to be a complicated project since Paramount Pictures had to completely redesign the titular protagonist based on community backlash, which resulted in the movie getting delayed to 2020.
However, there are movies based on video games that received positive reviews, such as Detective Pikachu; others were shown a mixed welcome like Assassin’s Creed.
So, there might be room for a GTA movie in the future, but only at the right conditions and perhaps based on characters and stories from Grand Theft Auto V.
The game has managed to secure a solid income in terms of microtransactions, and more than 115 million copies shipped for two different generations of consoles and PC.
