Rockstar Games Co-Founder Says Grand Theft Auto Movie 'Never Made Sense'

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Rockstar Games co-founder and former head writer Dan Houser has said a Grand Theft Auto movie "never made sense."


As reported by GI.biz, Houser told The Ankler that making the film — which has faded in and out of obscurity over the years — was a "huge risk" considering the reputation of the GTA brand.

"Why would we do this?," Houser and the other Rockstar leads asked the film executives. "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."

"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."

They thought we’d be blinded by the lights and that just wasn't the case.

Various concepts for a GTA film have risen and fallen over the years, including one reportedly starring Eminem, though Rockstar has remained firmly against it. This comes despite films stars like Jack Black unable to believe the likes of GTA and Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption franchise haven't been made into films amid the rise if video game adaptations such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Minecraft, Borderlands, and more.

The CEO of Rockstar parent company, Take-Two Interactive's Strauss Zelnick, made a similar comment to Houser in 2019. "Part of it is, 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 — and that would mean we’d need to finance that motion picture,” Zelnick said at the time.


GTA makes plenty of money sticking to its video game roots, of course. Grand Theft Auto 5 generated more than $1 billion within three days of launch in 2013, a number which will likely be blown out of the water when Grand Theft Auto 6 is released in fall 2025.

The GTA 6 trailer — which reintroduced fans to Rockstar's take on Miami, Vice City — featured a ton of intricate details (here are 99 things IGN spotted) and plenty of references to wild and wacky real life events too. While the game was revealed as a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S game, PC players were left frustrated, though not necessarily surprised, that their platform was left off the list.

They weren't the ones a little peeved though, as several developers from Rockstar itself took to social media to express their frustration at the trailer leaking early. In fact, the entire industry shared their disappointment that the exciting moment was dampened. Several streamers were also hit with content strikes and takedowns in the wake of the leak.

Regardless, it still surpassed Minecraft to become the second most-watched video game trailer of all time with more than 168 million views in the first three months.


Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.