It was, almost literally, the video game industry invading Hollywood. Microsoft sent a legion of actors decked out in Spartan armor from the Halo series to top studio executives around Hollywood. They strode through security without saying a word, and delivered copies of the Halo script with a letter from the company regarding terms. It was like Microsoft was saying: “make this movie or we’ll laser you in the face.”
In an excerpt from “Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood” published on Wired, Jamie Russell explains just how thoroughly Microsoft torpedoed its own chances of ever getting a Halo movie made. The mojo was there – Master chief and Halo were as recognizable as any action hero. But Microsoft just didn’t get Hollywood. Execs walked into negotiations assuming they could dictate the way they would go, and walked away with nothing. Writes Russell:
Games creators are, by their nature, engineers who deal in absolutes. For them the subtleties of Hollywood production, with its ebb-and-flow of egos and power plays, were often alien. “To sell a movie into a studio and actually get it made is a lot of work,” he says. “It takes a lot of conversations and a lot of pixie dust being thrown about while you’re getting the deals done. In the games industry, they’re technologists and they’re data driven. They’re looking at data points and saying: ‘We need the movie to be made, it’s got to be this, this and this. If you get A, B and C to be part of the movie, then great we’ll sell you the rights.’ You can’t do that.” But, if that’s what Microsoft wanted, CAA was willing to try.
The videogame industry’s fixation on turning popular franchises into movies is part of an inferiority complex endemic throughout the AAA gaming community. “Just like a Hollywood movie” feels like the highest praise, for a whole set of games, and when a game gets turned into a movie, it feels like the ultimate validation. When a movie gets turned into a game, it feels like a cheap cop-out.
The games community needs to relax. They make more money than movies. They have indie art projects just like movies, and they have blockbuster popcorn just like movies. Games have spent years as the black sheep of the entertainment industry, but now they’re like a prizefighter that still harbors his childhood insecurities from being beat up on the playground.
