The era of the bad video game movie is over, if Hollywood lets these guys do their job
Hollywood has finally cracked the code on making movies based on video games, at least from a box-office perspective. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy, and A Minecraft Movie have grossed billions combined since 2020. Whether they’re good movies is up for debate. Critically, TV seems to be where game adaptations are shining; Fallout and The Last of Us are legit prestige television, likely in part due to the close creative involvement of the people who make those games and producers who adore the source material.Two producers fighting to improve the quality of video game adaptations are Dmitri M. Johnson and Mike Goldberg, otherwise known as Story Kitchen. They’ve been working for years to make game adaptations better, or at a bare minimum, more authentic to creators’ visions and to the people who play those games. Story Kitchen’s work includes the Sonic the Hedgehog film franchise, the first film of which was famously delayed in response to fan criticism but wound up winning fans over.In recent years, Story Kitchen’s Goldberg and Johnson have gone into overdrive, locking down movie and TV deals for adaptations based on Tomb Raider, It Takes Two, Streets of Rage, and Just Cause. But the production company is just getting started, Goldberg and Johnson tell Polygon. In addition to getting indies into the mix, with upcoming adaptations of games like Sifu and Dredge, Story Kitchen is developing at least 10 projects for Sega in the wake of Sonic’s success.Polygon recently spoke to Goldberg and Johnson about their production company and what it’s working on — which includes a few surprises still to be announced. Read on for our full conversation, which has been edited for clarity.Mike Goldberg: We launched the production company [for] film and TV two and a half years ago. We specialize in sourcing, partnering, and working to adapt nontraditional IP into film and TV. When we say “nontraditional IP,” we are referring to video game IP. How this all came about was primarily off the heels of dj2 Entertainment, [which] Dmitri launched with the same thesis in mind. It was early days, and video game adaptations weren’t really a thing. They were attacked in the press. They were attacked in the media. Fans weren’t responding, and Dmitri didn’t believe, he thought a meaningful way was a field trip to Japan to finagle a meeting with the C-suite of Sega and to discuss with Sega their thoughts on finally unlocking [Sonic the Hedgehog] for film.At the time it was not at the top of their bucket list, but after years of campaigning [...] now we have the Sonic franchise.Fast-forward to launching Story Kitchen: I resigned from my agency to do it with Dmitri. Thanks to him, I was the No. 1 agent for video game IP into film and TV. I think I had 80 deals done from repping Atari, Square Enix, and Bandai Namco to the Tomb Raider deal — twice over as first we sold animated Tomb Raider in 2019 [...] and the live-action franchise built at Amazon [...] the Phoebe Waller-Bridge live-action tentpole series that’s in pre-production. [Ed. note: After our interview, reports have suggested that Waller-Bridge’s live-action Tomb Raider project is no longer moving forward at Amazon. We checked in with Story Kitchen, which said, “The show is not dead and still tracking forward.”]So to that end, we have an Amazon television first-look deal and a DreamWorks Animation film first-look deal. We’re external consultants, if you will. We have these shortcuts, but it’s great because we get additional intel and support if there’s a game that makes sense to bring into them. We love our indies, we love our AAAs, and it’s having the pleasure of working with everyone from Poncle with Vampire Survivors to Black Salt Games with Dredge. This conversation came out of Sifu, and that was such an extraordinary experience. We sold that game as a movie to Netflix during the double strikes of 2023. The writers and the actors were on the picket lines, and we’re like, OK, we can’t do much, but we’re talking to Netflix and [told them], Hey, there’s this game that’s extraordinary from a very young game developer and a very young game publisher, Sloclap and Kepler. And within less than five business days, they’re like, I love it. Let’s do it as a movie.Sifu Image: Sloclap via PolygonThis morning [we were] catching up with our writer, Chad Stahelski, and Netflix to really ensure that Sifu remains on the fast track for this year. Kepler was so impressed with us that they called us and they’re like, All right, here’s our slate until 2027. You guys did a great job. What are you excited about? And that’s what led us to [Clair Obscur: Expedition 33], which we just announced we are doing a couple weeks ago. That game is awesome; we have played it. It comes out April 24, and we’ve already done one massive attachment that hasn’t been announced, but we’re hoping to have another attachment in the next two weeks, and then we can announce our live-action film package around it. But it’s for the love of games and authentically connecting those dots. Dmitri Johnson: As much as we love and are grateful for the Tomb Raiders and the Sonics, we really do kind of live in the indie space. This goes back to even before Sonic came out: I was fortunate, and I don’t even honestly remember how it started, but I somehow got on the radar of the Swedish government. And every quarter, they would fly me over, and I would give talks on my thesis on taking games into film and TV. What that exposed me to, long before the rest of Hollywood, was the incredible hub of talent in the Nordics. So just getting to know those developers and those creators, the storytelling that was happening there was just mind-blowing. And Hollywood at the time was still very much driven by, How many copies did it sell? How much money did it make?We finally got to a point of: Don’t care; don’t ask anymore. Here’s why it’s a great story. Here’s why it’s a unique world. These are things we don’t currently have in film and TV. That’s why we’re excited. Over time we kind of trained [Hollywood], so at least on our side, we don’t get that question anymore. Now it’s totally about the creative, just like a producer who goes after New York Times bestsellers or comic books, graphic novels, [and] spec scripts — it’s about the creative. I tell everyone that it’s almost easier to get a deal done with the billion-dollar publishers than the indies because there’s so much more on the line [for indies]. It’s so much more personal. There’s a certain level of trust that has to be built over years, over decades. Fast-forward to today, we’re just in this incredible moment of really getting to live out our childhood dreams. I think we’re in various stages of development on 10 separate Sega properties together — just dream projects.Polygon: Obviously, Sonic the Hedgehog was a pretty big success story for you. What do you identify as the DNA that made that successful?Johnson: It’s all about the village you built. Sonic is such a special village because everyone involved had their own connection to the IP, grew up playing those games. It is driven by passion. Before Mike was our agent, in a weird cosmic coincidence, he repped the [Sonic the Hedgehog] writers separately. They were Sega kids, and they were passionate about the IP. So no one was going into it like, Let’s go make a billion-dollar franchise. Selfishly, we wanted to see this movie made for ourselves. We wanted to see a Sonic movie made the right way. We knew not only could it change the landscape for game adaptations, but again, if it’s the only one that got done, we got to make a Sonic movie. And that was kind of the driver on that.I think we approach all of these in the same way. Phoebe Waller-Bridge [making Tomb Raider], people are surprised, like, Wow, that’s kind of random. No, it’s not. She was a superfan. Her parents had to take her PlayStation away because she played for two weeks straight. So it’s finding those people. ToeJam and Earl, we’re out to a director right now who rapped about ToeJam in one of his songs. We try to do our research to find out who might be a kind of prebuilt fan, start there, and really build out just a village of passion. Now we like to say, You don’t have to be a gamer. You don’t have to have played these games. We do get great work from people who haven’t. But it definitely does create that special something when that can happen.In terms of approaching other Sega properties, what’s that work been like for you in terms of adapting? I’m a Shinobi fan, but even I’m kind of wondering, What is a Shinobi movie? What is a Streets of Rage movie? It’s a little harder to identify that than a Sonic the Hedgehog movie.Johnson: The Shinobi script is one of my favorite scripts we’ve developed. It is going to be so fun. We do a little bit of fan service for Shinobi fans; they’re going to be hyped for it. But my mom, who didn’t play Shinobi, she’s also going to be hyped. It’s going to be a great action film that has layers. Sam Hargrave wants to do some crazy shit that I personally want to see him pull it off. I’m like, I don’t know how you’re going to do that, but I want to see it. I want to be there.Goldberg: He’s our director. He came up in the John Wick camp, and then he directed Extraction and Extraction 2. And he’s doing Matchbox right now. It should be, if timing aligns, his next movie.Streets of Rage 4 Image: Lizardcube, Dotemu, Guard Crush Games/DotemuJohnson: It’s a really special script. We have a writer who grew up in Japan, but he also split his time between here and London. That’s reflected in the script. To have a writer who could actually pitch Sega Japan in Japanese was really, really cool. Streets of Rage has been number one on my list since I was 11 or 12. I remember being a kid, thinking, I’m going to make that a movie one day. The thing that both [Streets of Rage and Shinobi] have in common, the soundtrack — as a preteen, I just remember thinking, These are so cinematic. These are actual movie scores.The breakfast that I had this morning, when Mike was on with Chad and Netflix, was with the potential director for Streets of Rage, and half of the conversation was about music. It was, As important as the action scenes are going to be, the music has to hit. I go back to the original Mortal Kombat film: From the first second, the New Line logo comes out [and] you hear that “Mortal Kombat!” — you’re just on a ride for the rest of the 90 minutes. I feel like we’ve got to do that with Streets of Rage. Shinobi, different type of soundtrack, but equally important. But I would say the thing about Sega is, they keep us honest. Each time we spark with an idea of what we want to do next, we have to talk through it. We have to go through our approach and really make a case for why it should exist.Goldberg: In our opinion, it’s authenticity. Because every game should not be adapted. We are asking ourselves three questions:Should the game be adapted, period? And if so, should the game be adapted now?If so, what medium should it be? Is it a live-action film? Is it live-action TV? Is it an animated film? Is it animated TV? [We’re] always challenging ourselves to answer those questions and then match up authentic fans, honest ways to do it, no trickery. Clearly, there was a massive rejection when [previous video game] adaptations felt like a big commercial. That did not go well, and gamers are the first ones to call it out. So it shouldn’t be that way. It should be, if I were to make a dream come true and we were to see an expansion of a story, [...] what would be the dopest way to expand that story? That is part of the process that we’re always pushing to solve.Johnson: To the point of authenticity: A lot of times, contractually we’re not allowed to argue or debate with the internet, but I remember when Disco Elysium was announced, it was like, Oh my god, how are they making it a movie? The game’s not even out yet. What you want to say is, “We’ve been working side by side with them for two years. We’ve read the almost-500-page game script from front to back. We’ve heard the entire soundtrack. We’ve played the game multiple times.” Those are things you can’t say [publicly], but we always start from that authentic place. We play everything we get behind. Ideally, we can consume and read everything that we can. We really want to know these things inside and out. And like Mike said, sometimes the takeaway is, I’m so excited for this game. It doesn’t need to be a movie. It doesn’t need to be a TV show. But when it kind of triggers that special thing like [Clair Obscur: Expedition 33] did, yes, you get excited, and you start thinking about the filmmakers who can make this thing a reality.Disco Elysium Image: ZA/UMWhat is Disco Elysium going to be? Is that going to be a movie? A TV show? Live action? Animated? What’s the thought on that?Goldberg: So there was a significant pause on that exploration while the co-founders worked through their legal quagmire [...] to give them the space to do that for the last few years. [ZA/UM is] back, they’re ready to rock. We sat with them and we are now getting reengaged with being able to reopen those conversations and explorations. We actually had incoming offers to do it as a film and TV show, and we were working with them to dial down into [their] preferences. We had to pull back when the unfortunate things that everyone has read about started to occur — as we should! And honestly, even if we wanted to put our fingers in our ears and ignore it, it would’ve been the wrong thing to do to them. And also a chain-of-title perspective. It just would’ve made things more complicated. We had to ramp down, and now we’re so excited to be ramping back up.Johnson: But to answer you, the conversations before all that were definitely around live action.You both talked a little bit about finding fans and finding authentic participants who were excited about the intellectual property. But for something like Dredge, Kingmakers, or Sifu — which don’t have a long legacy, which don’t have multiple stories to draw from — what’s that process like of finding talent and interested parties to make that kind of material?Johnson: Those are the ones we’re proudest of. We prefer to get in front of a game’s release, which, again, isn’t really the way Hollywood used to do it. It’s much easier to say, “This made a billion dollars.” We like to say we don’t chase heat, but we enjoy it when it follows. One of the best examples of that was It Takes Two. That was a game that we fell in love with. We flagged for Hollywood, like, Hey, you want to be involved with this? Come in now. They waited for it to release and win all the awards, and then every studio in town wanted it. After that exercise, we have gained a lot of trust and goodwill in the industry, where now, when we flag something, we’re treated a bit more like tastemakers, and we kind of get the attention of agents, managers, writers, [and] directors, and it at least opens up a conversation.If the conversation leads to more interest, that’s when we slowly start bringing them into the village. So if there’s a game that’s not coming out for another year and a half, two years, [we say], Come over to the house. Let’s play through it together. Let’s talk through it. We’ll put together shareable materials. We really help throw them in there with us and really start understanding what it is. Because again, we don’t want talent [or] studio partners to just come in because because of how it sold. We really want our partners to love it for the right reason.Goldberg: I’ll put on a former agent hat. What’s ridiculous is, New York Times bestselling books typically start at the lower end of the spectrum, somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 units sold. [...] The New York Times bestselling list is great, and Hollywood goes insane for it. But if you look at an indie game, even an indie game that’s, like, a basement garage dev and it’s his or her or their first game, and that game comes out, and it’ll sell tens or hundreds of thousands of copies, millions of copies. Not just in English and [in] North America; these [are] indie games that are selling in multiple languages, multiple countries.So we remind our friends, the buyers on the film and TV side, You’re willing to go after a New York Times bestselling property, or a manuscript that has not yet published. Why would you be hesitant to wait to see how the game does? It makes no sense to us. […] The buying executives having come up with us now, that were assistants with us and junior executives with us, that also had Ataris or Nintendos or Segas, PlayStations, [Xboxes], that started the process at the same time — they get it. We can poke holes in that concept all day long, because for a game to be produced and then be shipped, there’s going to be game scripts, there’s going to be game bibles; we get ’em all, as Dimitri was saying. There’s going to be playable builds, or even vertical slices we will share if we can.But we bring the onboarding materials in. If you’re going to take a bet on that book, why would you not take a bet on something that is audiovisual, and probably going to do it outstandingly better than that book? So it’s been a bit of retraining everyone and adjusting the narrative. And Hollywood has become a lot more flexible, accepting. And when they don’t listen to us — like Dmitri’s example of It Takes Two — we make them financially pay for it, to their detriment and our rights holders’ benefit. [laughs]It Takes Two Image: Hazelight Studios/Electronic Arts via PolygonI wanted to ask about the original Sonic the Hedgehog showing, and how there was a lot of strong pushback to that. How do you factor in that kind of feedback from that incident? How has that factored into your work, in terms of setting up projects and talking to studios and creatives to convey, Here’s what you actually need to do with this project to make it authentic?Johnson: I’ll answer that in a more broad, general way, to not get us in trouble. Look, that was a period in time where I think Hollywood thought they knew better than the folks who made the game, the thing that we were excited about in the first place. I think that’s how we got the original [Super Mario Bros.] movie. I think that’s how we got some of those awful, awful, awful early adaptations — they would take the rights and kind of shove the talent to the side. We flipped that on its head. After Sonic, that definitely changed the pushback that we had, and the pushback we could do on behalf of our game partners.So, one of the exercises I like to point to is how we handled Tomb Raider. The original Tomb Raider films, [the creatives] largely felt like they were not as much a part of that conversation as they would’ve liked. So the first thing we did [with Tomb Raider] was, we flew up to Crystal Dynamics several times, and spent hours just filling up whiteboards: Lara Croft is this. She’s not this. We’re going to touch on this. We’re not going to touch on this. And we ended up with this exercise that really created this creative sandbox, and it was really effective. If our game partners are too busy focusing on the next game, they knew that their vision, that their concerns, were documented. In the case of Crystal, they have more resources than others. So we actually have had dedicated teammates. But for the smaller indie studios, that exercise has been extremely key for protecting their voice. The other thing we do is, we get them a seat at the table. Pre-Sonic 1, there was a lot of lip service: Oh, we are going to be a partner. And then, again, they show up to the movie and it’s unrecognizable [to them].We fight for our partners on the gaming side to get producing credit. And that’s not just so that they can see their name on the screen, or make some producing money. It’s so that, legally, they’re part of every conversation. If we’re talking actors, actresses; if we’re getting movie outlines, TV outlines; they’re seeing it in real time. So we treat them like a real partner, with a real seat at the table. And what we do is, we try to do a delicate dance making both sides clear upfront: We have to make the best film, we have to make the best TV, but we’re going to do it while honoring our partners and their original vision as much as possible.What’s next? What’s closest to filming, coming to completion? Talk to me about the slate and how things are kind of jelling.Goldberg: I’m trying to think of what has already been messaged out there. In addition to having Tomb Raider in production right now, animated and live action, there’s a couple that are moving so fast, but we haven’t officially announced yet. We have some big things planned to announce. It feels like 2025 is going to be a pretty extraordinary year. There’s a lot of fantastic momentum. Johnson: I will tell you this: Sifu is tracking incredibly well. We’re super excited about that. The same with Shinobi; it’s moving unbelievably fast. There’s Just Cause with Universal that we’ve announced. It Takes Two, which the Sonic writers are adapting for us — such a wonderful adaptation of that. We are really excited about how that one’s coming together. Ruiner, the indie game that we’re doing with Wes Ball, who directed all the Maze Runner movies and did [Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes] and is going to do [The Legend of Zelda] — we have a draft. Those are things that are announced. Then there’s things that haven’t been announced, but when they’re announced, they’ll be announced with speed. They’re primarily TV-facing, but they’re huge, break-the-internet type of announcements that our nerdoms are exploding on — and we can’t believe it hasn’t leaked. Then there’s the new things we’re putting together. We are so close to getting our Vampire Survivors package out and our Dredge package out. Our last 24 hours have been consumed [by] Hazelight’s new game, Split Fiction, that has done extraordinarily well since the game came out. We are in the middle of it with Hazelight, [and] we have a massive [meeting] in a few minutes with someone who could be one of the two characters for the movie. It’s unbelievable.One of the projects we’re most excited about is with Brooklyn’s own (by way of London) Sam Barlow. We’re putting together Her Story, which is a passion project. Goldberg: Sam is so unbelievable as a game developer. [We think] it should be a movie, as a tight, twisty concept. It’s an intimate movie, and we’ve been building our village for that.See More:
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