Video game movies have been a hit-and-miss in Hollywood cinema, and this is why Rockstar Games boss Dan Houser was wary of making a GTA movie that could have starred the prolific actor Walton Goggins. He was quite a popular casting choice among the fans.
As the previous head writer and co-founder of Rockstar Games, Houser supervised the project and protected it so much as to reject every possible call from filmmakers who want to make a movie out of the successful game franchise.
Why Is There No GTA Live-Action Adaptation?
In a recent interview with The Ankler, former VP of creativity at Rockstar Games Dan Houser revealed they have received many offers to make a GTA movie, and every single time, he would say no.
After a few awkward dates, we’d ask [the executives], why would we do this? 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.
Fans may have been wondering why there’s never a proper Grand Theft Auto live-action movie, and this is the reason. These studios would want to have full control of the IP hence, Rockstar Games will be left no say in whatever happens in the movie. It’s already a known fact that many video game films failed in the market for this very reason.
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.
Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick previously said via TheWrap that “if we were to do something like that, we’d want to have complete creative control to make sure we expressed [GTA] in the way we wanted.” This also means that they are going to finance the project.
This one condition from the makers behind GTA is why it’s taking an eternity for fans to finally have a long-overdue movie adaptation. In fact, they already have their dream cast and one of them is Walton Goggins for Trevor Philips in Grand Theft Auto V.
Walton Goggins Would Have Led The GTA Movie
Fans would recognize Goggins from Amazon Prime’s Fallout as The Ghoul. For the longest time, he has been a fan-favorite actor to star as the main character lest a GTA film happens.
It’s incredibly disappointing that fans may never see the actor play Trevor after what Rockstar Games declared as its top condition in making a movie out of it. Fans can’t blame the video game publisher either. They want to protect the legacy of the game by not letting any studio recklessly handle it.
It would take a miracle to see this situation make a hundred and eighty degrees turn, but while fans wait, check out and play GTA 5 via PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
