Grand Theft Auto was never adapted into a movie because “the risk never made sense” when weighed up against the “economics,” according to former Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser.
Speaking with The Ankler (via Gamesindustry.biz), Houser said that discussions were had multiple times about the possibility of turning Rockstar titles like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption into movies. According to Houser, after multiple meetings with higher-ups, Rockstar would ask executives: “Why would we do this?” Apparently, the execs believed this was an opportunity to make a movie out of one of the company’s popular IPs.
Houser explained in the interview that his reasoning for turning down these opportunities was due to the risk. “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,” the former Rockstar leader said.
“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 [Grand Theft Auto & Red Dead Redemption], and the economics never made sense. The risk never made sense. In those days, the perception was that games made poor-quality movies.”
This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard whispers of a Grand Theft Auto movie adaptation that never came to be. In 2022, games industry veteran Kirk Ewing (a friend of the Houser brothers) said he approached Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser with an offer from a producer to make a movie starring rapper Eminem shortly after GTA III launched. According to Ewing, Sam turned down the offer and suggested that Rockstar Games withdrew from conversations about an adaptation “when they realised that the media franchise that they had…was bigger than any movie that was going on at the time.”
As mentioned by Dan Houser, who now heads Absurd Ventures, these conversations about Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption movies occurred back in a time when many video game adaptations were bombing critically and at the box office. Since then, we’ve seen plenty of wildly successful adaptations, including the recent Fallout and The Last of Us television series among many others. Even Houser said it’s a “different time now” for gaming and Hollywood crossovers, and discussed in the interview how Absurd Ventures planned to create new IP that could potentially turn into major media adaptations.
While we may not have gotten a Grand Theft Auto movie in the end, Hollywood has turned a corner with adapting video game franchises, so there’s hope yet that maybe one day we’ll see one of Rockstar’s games hit the big (or small) screen. In the meantime, GTA 6 is on the horizon.
What would you want to see from a GTA movie? Let us know in the comments.
Image: Rockstar Games / Absurd Ventures
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