Rockstar Co-Founder: No 'GTA' or 'Red Dead' Film Adaptations Due to Too High Risk

Bounding Into Comics Reports: Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser has revealed that the reason why the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption never received any sort of film or television adaptation was nothing more than their own belief in artistic integrity.

Houser, who served as Rockstar Games’ head writer and VP of creativity until he resigned in 2020 to form his own Absurd Ventures production studio, spoke to the franchises’ lack of respective Hollywood outings during a recent interview given to The Ankler’s Peter Kiefer.

Reflecting on the unsurprising bevy of times he met with studio executives to discuss a potential adaptation, the writer-turned-produced detailed, “After a few awkward dates. We’d ask, why would we do this? [They’d say] ‘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.”

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