Waiting for a GTA movie? Don't hold your breath, says Rockstar's Dan Houser
Grand Theft Auto: The Movie. It has a ring to it, right? A gaming series that wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve, you’d think it’d be the perfect fit for silver screen adaptation. But don’t hold your breath – Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser says it unlikely to ever happen, and for good reason.
“We’ve been offered, many times, and it’s never appealed,” Houser told The Guardian.
“The money’s never been close to be worth risking one’s crown jewels. Our small dabblings with Hollywood have always left us running back to games. The freedom we have to do what we want creatively is of enormous value. The second you go near Hollywood, people seem willing, or have been forced, to lose a lot of that control. That sort of amorphous ‘that won’t test well’ attitude is exactly how we don’t work. We’ve always tried to think of stuff that’s innovative and new, and to go into a world where that’s not encouraged would be horrible.”
Though careful to state that he sees it as an equally unlikely move, Houser did say he believed GTA would be a better fit for an ongoing TV series.
“There’s still plenty of kudos in doing a film, but you shouldn’t ever do anything in your life for kudos,” he said.
“It’s much easier to imagine GTA as a TV series, as the form is closer, but I still think we’d be losing too much to ever actually do it. We’ve got this big open-world experience that’s 100 hours long, and that gives players control over what they do, what they see, and how they see it. A world where you can do everything from rob a bank to take a yoga lesson to watch TV, all in your own time. How do you condense that into a two-hour or 12-hour experience where you take away the main things: player agency and freedom?”
What do you think? Could GTA work as a movie or TV show, or should we stick with the likes of Goodfellas and The Sopranos, the stories that inspired GTA in the first place? Let us know what you think in the comments section below!
