Can the 'Grand Theft Auto' Guy Fix Hollywood's IP Problem?
Dan Houser created video games too valuable to be made into movies. Now he’s building a new kind of IP factory
Dan Houser knows what it’s like to show up in Hollywood with an attractive piece of IP.
As the cofounder, head writer and VP of creativity at Rockstar Games, he was a driving force behind some of the most successful, groundbreaking — and highly cinematic — video game franchises of all time, including the urban crime neo-noir Grand Theft Auto and the Western-themed Red Dead Redemption. His synthesis of Hollywood influences into gaming spurred the Grand Theft Auto titles, for example, to sales of more than 400 million units.
So over the years, of course Houser would get a call to talk about adapting his already filmic work into a movie or TV project.
“After a few awkward dates,” Houser says, “we’d ask [the executives], why would we do this?”
Their response: “Because you get to make a movie.”
“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,” he says.
As you likely figured, despite fans still clamoring for live-action versions of Houser’s creations, there’s never been a Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption movie.
“They thought we’d be blinded by the lights and that just wasn't the case,” he tells me as we stroll through Santa Monica’s Palisades Park along Ocean Avenue. “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.”
But as Houser notes, “It's a different time now.”
Indeed, the entertainment industry has finally come around to gaming IP and started to figure out how to translate it to the screen successfully, from The Last of Us to Fallout to The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
In perhaps the nick of time, too, as IP-mad Hollywood has been casting its net into deep waters in search of “fresh” IP, fishing out everything from long-forgotten Bette Midler vehicles from almost 40 years ago (Outrageous Fortune) to an 80-year-old Ernst Lubitsch classic that was remade by Warren Beatty 45 years ago (Heaven Can Wait). This kind of IP-as-prerequisite to get anything made these days likely has Bob Evans turning over in his grave, yet is considered the safest way today to hedge against risk.
But as we've seen in the past few years, not all IP is created equal. Madame Web is not the same as assorted other Spider-Man iterations. And not all IP can be extended ad infinitum (see: Fast X or Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Or Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny as proof that something long in the tooth is sometimes too long).
So here comes Houser, 50, who moved to L.A. in 2020 from New York after he shocked the gaming world by leaving Rockstar, ready to cash in with his new startup, Absurd Ventures, which he founded last year and has been in stealth mode until now.
But in his first in-depth interview about Absurd, he explains how he is ready to work with Hollywood now to create an IP pipeline. and how he intends to do it.