Don’t hold your breath for a GTA or Red Dead movie after Take-Two CEO comments

Fans of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption hoping for either series to get a movie or TV series adaptation should stop waiting.

GTA and Red Dead Redemption are two of the biggest gaming franchises of all time, with players eagerly awaiting GTA 6 after Rockstar stunned audiences with the fantastic RDR2 in 2018.

In the years since, the world has been treated to many fantastic video game adaptations in the film and TV space such as The Last of Us, The Mario Movie, Sonic, Castlevania, Arcane, and many more.

As such, some fans have expected that it’s just a matter of time before Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, gives the goahead for GTA or Red Dead to get the same treatment, but that seems increasingly unlikely.

In a new interview with Gamesindustry, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked about the success of recent video game adaptions and what that means for the future of their IPs, especially after the disastrous Borderlands movie.

“The movie was disappointing,” he admitted, but noted how the film’s launch actually resulted in the company selling more of its catalogue than it anticipated.

When questioned if adaptions have become more “challenging” given the rise in quality of video game movies, Zelnick was adamant that the company is very strict when it comes to its IPs.

“That’s one of the many reasons that we’re very, very selective about bringing our intellectual properties to other media.”

Interestingly, GTA and Red Dead movies have been discussed at Rockstar before. Earlier in 2024, game studio’s co-founder Dan Houser, who left in 2020, revealed that he had received calls about Hollywood adapting GTA or Red Dead into a TV or movie project.

Ultimately, the films were rejected by Rockstar because the studio wouldn’t be the ones with creative control.

“They thought we’d be blinded by the lights and that just wasn’t the case,” he explained. “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.”

However, a GTA movie is still coming… sort of. An entire film, Grand Theft Hamlet, was shot in the world of GTA Online, and streaming platform MUBI has acquired distribution rights after it premiered earlier this year at SXSW.