Hideo Kojima might be able to finally live out his dream of being a film director, as Kojima Productions has launched a new division focused on film, TV, and music, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz. The new division will be based in Los Angeles, California, and will center around taking the studio’s games into other mediums of pop culture.
Riley Russel, who served various roles at PlayStation over the past 28 years, will be joining the studio as the lead of the new division. “The new division will be tasked with working with creative and talented professionals in television, music and film, as well as the more familiar games industry,” says Russel. The goal of the LA-based division is to expand “the reach and awareness of the properties now under development at Kojima Productions.”
The studio is working on a new project that it was hiring for last year, so it’s highly likely this new division will develop properties based on both Death Stranding and this potentially new IP. Kojima himself is famously a film fanatic. Before getting into game development, he wanted to be a film director but wasn’t able to make it in the industry.
Metal Gear Solid’s various entries are filled with love letters to several films. MGS3 has a notoriously long ladder sequence that plays the game’s main theme, itself an homage to James Bond themes. MGS5 even replaced David Hayter with Kiefer Sutherland as the voice of Big Boss. Whether Kojima himself makes any films or not remains to be seen, but it’s unsurprising that he would want to branch out into them.
