Don’t hold your breath for a GTA or Red Dead movie after Take-Two’s CEO’s comments

Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption fans hoping to see both series get a movie or TV series adaptation should stop waiting.

GTA and Red Dead Redemption are two of the biggest gaming franchises of all time, which players eagerly await GTA6 after Rockstar wowed audiences with the fantastic RDR2 in 2018.

In the years since, the world has been treated to many fantastic video game adaptations in the film and TV space, such as The last of usThe Mario Movie, Sonic, Castlevania, Arcaneand much more.

As such, some fans have expected that it’s only a matter of time before Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, greenlights GTA or Red Dead to get the same treatment, but that’s looking increasingly unlikely.

In a new interview with Games industryTake-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked about the success of recent video game adaptations and what that means for the future of their IPs, especially after the disastrous Borderlands movie.

“The movie was disappointing,” he admitted, but noted how the film’s launch actually led to the business sell more of his catalogue than expected.

When asked if adaptations have become “more challenging” given the rising quality of video game movies, Zelnick was adamant that the company is very strict when it comes to its IPs.

“That is one of the many reasons why we are very selective in bringing our intellectual properties to other media.”

Interestingly, GTA and Red Dead films have been previously discussed at Rockstar. Earlier in 2024, game studio co-founder Dan Houser, who left in 2020, revealed he had received calls about Hollywood adapting GTA or Red Dead into a TV or film project.

In the end it was the movies rejected by Rockstar because the studio wouldn’t be the ones to have creative control.

“They thought we were going to be blinded by the lights, but that just wasn’t the case,” he explained. “We had what we considered a multi-billion dollar IP, and the economics never made sense. The risk never made sense. At the time, the perception was that games made movies of poor quality.”

However, there’s still a GTA movie coming… sort of. A whole movie Grand theft hamletwas shot in the world of GTA Onlineand streaming platform MUBI has acquired distribution rights after it premiered at SXSW earlier this year.