Former Rockstar boss reveals all about Grand Theft Auto movie
When you have an IP as 'grand' as Grand Theft Auto, you don't really need to be taken beyond the confines of video games. Long before GTA V was becoming the most profitable entertainment product of all time (thanks largely to GTA Online), the GTA name was doing just fine without the Tinsel Town treatment.
The thing about GTA games is that they're so well-acted, and their technology is so good for the time, it feels like you're part of a 10-hour movie when you play them anyway. Like we've never seen a Call of Duty movie, there's a sense that no one would be able to do these colossal franchises justice.
Why GTA has never had a movie?
Click to enlargeEven if you gave the GTA name to Quentin Tarantino, Peter Jackson, James Cameron, or Martin Scorsese, chances are it would fall short of expectations. Similar to the critiques that the Harry Potter movies couldn't capture the magic of the books, there will always be someone who dislikes the direction it's taken in.
These fears have been discussed before, with Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick saying he's equally sceptical about a GTA movie because it takes the creativity out of the series by locking you into a singular path. That and his worries about how much it would cost to make a GTA movie.
Now, former Rockstar co-founder and GTA creator Dan Houser has given his own insight into the franchise's early days, the movie that could've been, and what went wrong. Speaking to The Ankler, Houser explained how both GTA and Red Dead Redemption has been floated as potential live-action movies, but the execs decided against it.
"After a few awkward dates, we'd ask [the executives], 'Why would we do this?" said Houser. Those at the top would apparently say, "Because you get to make a movie," before House continued, "And we'd be like, no, what you've described is you making a movie and us having no control and taking a huge risk that we’re going to end up paying for with something that belongs to us."
Suggesting that bank balances were getting in the way of logic, Houser continued, "They thought we’d be blinded by the lights and that just wasn't the case...We had what we considered to be multi-billion-dollar IP, and the economics never made sense. The risk never made sense. In those days, the perception was that games made poor-quality movies."
A GTA movie could work now
Click to enlarge
We're a long way off from seeing a live-action GTA movie, but in some alternate timeline, we're probably at Fast & Furious levels of GTA movies by now. Another tantalising what-if is that Rockstar reportedly turned down a GTA movie that could've potentially starred Eminem and been directed by Top Gun's Tony Scott.
Despite Houser having left Rockstar in 2020 to focus on his Absurd Ventures studio, his brother Sam Houser is still at Rockstar and presumably hard at work on GTA 6. Although Dan doesn't think a GTA movie would've worked back then, he admitted, "It's a different time now."
While we don't want to jinx it, the recent boom in video game adaptations has seen the likes of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, The Last of Us, and Fallout earn critical and commercial success on the small and silver screen. It seems inevitable that we'll one day get a GTA movie, but if it ends up being as bad as Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, don't come crying to us.
