Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser has revealed that the reason why the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption never received any sort of film or television adaptation was nothing more than their own belief in artistic integrity.
Houser, who served as Rockstar Games’ head writer and VP of creativity until he resigned in 2020 to form his own Absurd Ventures production studio, spoke to the franchises’ lack of respective Hollywood outings during a recent interview given to The Ankler’s Peter Kiefer.
Reflecting on the unsurprising bevy of times he met with studio executives to discuss a potential adaptation, the writer-turned-produced detailed, “After a few awkward dates. We’d ask, why would we do this? [They’d say] ‘Because you get to make a movie,’ 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.”
“They thought we’d be blinded by the lights and that just wasn’t the case,” he further detailed to Kiefer. “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.”
To his last point, Houser then admitted that despite previously feeling this way, he had since come to believe (unsurprisingly so given that Absurd Venture studios’ main mission is to streamline the IP-to-Hollywood pipeline), “It’s a different time now.”
Though Houser did not name any names in regards to which studios had approached him with what offers, according to a previous interview with industry veteran and personal friend of both Dan and his brother, Rockstar Games co-founder and current president Sam Houser, Kirk Ewing, one such proposal reportedly toy with the idea of having original Top Gun director helm an adaptation starring rapper Eminem.
Recalling a phone call with an unidentified producer, Ewing detailed to the eponymous host of the BBC’s Bugzy Malone’s Grandest Game podcast, “He said ‘Kirk we’ve got Eminem to star, and it’s a Tony Scott film – $5m on the nose. Are you interested?’ And I phoned up Sam and I said ‘Listen to this. They want Eminem in the Grand Theft Auto movie and Tony Scott to direct’. And he said: ‘Not interested’.”
As to why Dan and Sam turned down the multi-million dollar offer, Ewing explained, “[They realized] the media franchise that they had was bigger than any movie that was going on at the time”.