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 theyâre 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. Theyâve been working for years to make game adaptations better, or at a bare minimum, more authentic to creatorsâ visions and to the people who play those games. Story Kitchenâs 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 Kitchenâs 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 Sonicâs success.
Polygon recently spoke to Goldberg and Johnson about their production company and what itâs working on â 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 ânontraditional IP,â 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 werenât really a thing. They were attacked in the press. They were attacked in the media. Fans werenât responding, and Dmitri didnât 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 [âŠ] 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 â twice over as first we sold animated Tomb Raider in 2019 [âŠ] and the live-action franchise built at Amazon [âŠ] the Phoebe Waller-Bridge live-action tentpole series thatâs in pre-production.Â
[Ed. note: After our interview, reports have suggested that Waller-Bridgeâs live-action Tomb Raider project is no longer moving forward at Amazon. We checked in with Story Kitchen, which said, âThe show is not dead and still tracking forward.â]
So to that end, we have an Amazon television first-look deal and a DreamWorks Animation film first-look deal. Weâre external consultants, if you will. We have these shortcuts, but itâs great because we get additional intel and support if thereâs a game that makes sense to bring into them.Â
We love our indies, we love our AAAs, and itâs 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 weâre like, OK, we canât do much, but weâre talking to Netflix and [told them], Hey, thereâs this game thatâs extraordinary from a very young game developer and a very young game publisher, Sloclap and Kepler. And within less than five business days, theyâre like, I love it. Letâs do it as a movie.
This 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 theyâre like, All right, hereâs our slate until 2027. You guys did a great job. What are you excited about? And thatâs 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 weâve already done one massive attachment that hasnât been announced, but weâre hoping to have another attachment in the next two weeks, and then we can announce our live-action film package around it. But itâs for the love of games and authentically connecting those dots.Â
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 donât 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: Donât care; donât ask anymore. Hereâs why itâs a great story. Hereâs why itâs a unique world. These are things we donât currently have in film and TV. Thatâs why weâre excited. Over time we kind of trained [Hollywood], so at least on our side, we donât get that question anymore. Now itâs totally about the creative, just like a producer who goes after New York Times bestsellers or comic books, graphic novels, [and] spec scripts â itâs about the creative. I tell everyone that itâs almost easier to get a deal done with the billion-dollar publishers than the indies because thereâs so much more on the line [for indies]. Itâs so much more personal. Thereâs a certain level of trust that has to be built over years, over decades. Fast-forward to today, weâre just in this incredible moment of really getting to live out our childhood dreams. I think weâre in various stages of development on 10 separate Sega properties together â 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: Itâs 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, Letâs 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 itâs 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, thatâs kind of random. No, itâs not. She was a superfan. Her parents had to take her PlayStation away because she played for two weeks straight. So itâs finding those people. ToeJam and Earl, weâre 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 donât have to be a gamer. You donât have to have played these games. We do get great work from people who havenât. But it definitely does create that special something when that can happen.
In terms of approaching other Sega properties, whatâs that work been like for you in terms of adapting? Iâm a Shinobi fan, but even Iâm kind of wondering, What is a Shinobi movie? What is a Streets of Rage movie? Itâs a little harder to identify that than a Sonic the Hedgehog movie.
Johnson: The Shinobi script is one of my favorite scripts weâve developed. It is going to be so fun. We do a little bit of fan service for Shinobi fans; theyâre going to be hyped for it. But my mom, who didnât play Shinobi, sheâs also going to be hyped. Itâs 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. Iâm like, I donât know how youâre going to do that, but I want to see it. I want to be there.
Goldberg: Heâs our director. He came up in the John Wick camp, and then he directed Extraction and Extraction 2. And heâs doing Matchbox right now. It should be, if timing aligns, his next movie.
Johnson: Itâs a really special script. We have a writer who grew up in Japan, but he also split his time between here and London. Thatâs reflected in the script. To have a writer who could actually pitch Sega Japan in Japanese was really, really cool.Â
Streets of Rage has been number one on my list since I was 11 or 12. I remember being a kid, thinking, Iâm going to make that a movie one day. The thing that both [Streets of Rage and Shinobi] have in common, the soundtrack â 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 âMortal Kombat!â â youâre just on a ride for the rest of the 90 minutes. I feel like weâve got to do that with Streets of Rage. Shinobi, different type of soundtrack, but equally important.Â
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, itâs authenticity. Because every game should not be adapted. We are asking ourselves three questions:
Should the game be adapted, period?Â
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?Â
[Weâre] 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 shouldnât 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, [âŠ] what would be the dopest way to expand that story? That is part of the process that weâre always pushing to solve.
Johnson: To the point of authenticity: A lot of times, contractually weâre 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 gameâs not even out yet. What you want to say is, âWeâve been working side by side with them for two years. Weâve read the almost-500-page game script from front to back. Weâve heard the entire soundtrack. Weâve played the game multiple times.â Those are things you canât 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, Iâm so excited for this game. It doesnât need to be a movie. It doesnât 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.
What is Disco Elysium going to be? Is that going to be a movie? A TV show? Live action? Animated? Whatâs the thought on that?
Goldberg: So there was a significant pause on that exploration while the co-founders worked through their legal quagmire [âŠ] to give them the space to do that for the last few years. [ZA/UM is] back, theyâre ready to rock. We sat with them and we are now getting reengaged with being able to reopen those conversations and explorations.Â
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 â as we should! And honestly, even if we wanted to put our fingers in our ears and ignore it, it wouldâve been the wrong thing to do to them. And also a chain-of-title perspective. It just wouldâve made things more complicated. We had to ramp down, and now weâre 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 â which donât have a long legacy, which donât have multiple stories to draw from â whatâs that process like of finding talent and interested parties to make that kind of material?
Johnson: Those are the ones weâre proudest of. We prefer to get in front of a gameâs release, which, again, isnât really the way Hollywood used to do it. Itâs much easier to say, âThis made a billion dollars.â We like to say we donât 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, weâre 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, thatâs when we slowly start bringing them into the village. So if thereâs a game thatâs not coming out for another year and a half, two years, [we say], Come over to the house. Letâs play through it together. Letâs talk through it. Weâll put together shareable materials. We really help throw them in there with us and really start understanding what it is. Because again, we donât 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: Iâll put on a former agent hat. Whatâs 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. [âŠ] 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 thatâs, like, a basement garage dev and itâs his or her or their first game, and that game comes out, and itâll 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, Youâre 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. [âŠ] 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 â they get it. We can poke holes in that concept all day long, because for a game to be produced and then be shipped, thereâs going to be game scripts, thereâs going to be game bibles; we get âem all, as Dimitri was saying. Thereâs going to be playable builds, or even vertical slices we will share if we can.
But we bring the onboarding materials in. If youâre 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 itâs been a bit of retraining everyone and adjusting the narrative. And Hollywood has become a lot more flexible, accepting. And when they donât listen to us â like Dmitriâs example of It Takes Two â we make them financially pay for it, to their detriment and our rights holdersâ benefit. [laughs]
I 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, Hereâs what you actually need to do with this project to make it authentic?
Johnson: Iâll 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 thatâs how we got the original [Super Mario Bros.] movie. I think thatâs how we got some of those awful, awful, awful early adaptations â 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 wouldâve 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. Sheâs not this. Weâre going to touch on this. Weâre 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 itâs unrecognizable [to them].
We fight for our partners on the gaming side to get producing credit. And thatâs not just so that they can see their name on the screen, or make some producing money. Itâs so that, legally, theyâre part of every conversation. If weâre talking actors, actresses; if weâre getting movie outlines, TV outlines; theyâre 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 weâre going to do it while honoring our partners and their original vision as much as possible.
Whatâs next? Whatâs closest to filming, coming to completion? Talk to me about the slate and how things are kind of jelling.
Goldberg: Iâm 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, thereâs a couple that are moving so fast, but we havenât officially announced yet. We have some big things planned to announce. It feels like 2025 is going to be a pretty extraordinary year. Thereâs a lot of fantastic momentum.Â
Johnson: I will tell you this: Sifu is tracking incredibly well. Weâre super excited about that. The same with Shinobi; itâs moving unbelievably fast. Thereâs Just Cause with Universal that weâve announced. It Takes Two, which the Sonic writers are adapting for us â such a wonderful adaptation of that. We are really excited about how that oneâs coming together. Ruiner, the indie game that weâre 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] â we have a draft.Â
Those are things that are announced. Then thereâs things that havenât been announced, but when theyâre announced, theyâll be announced with speed. Theyâre primarily TV-facing, but theyâre huge, break-the-internet type of announcements that our nerdoms are exploding on â and we canât believe it hasnât leaked. Then thereâs the new things weâre 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] Hazelightâs 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. Itâs unbelievable.
One of the projects weâre most excited about is with Brooklynâs own (by way of London) Sam Barlow. Weâre putting together Her Story, which is a passion project.Â
Goldberg: Sam is so unbelievable as a game developer. [We think] it should be a movie, as a tight, twisty concept. Itâs an intimate movie, and weâve been building our village for that.
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