Grand Theft Auto - Trailer

Grand Theft Auto - Trailer - You know Gamer, right? That movie with a pasty-faced kid controlling human prisoners in a future game? Well, it turns out that the film almost ended up as a Grand Theft Auto joint. According to a recent interview with co-writer/director Mark Neveldine, We (Neveldine and co-writer Brian Taylor) actually were going to be hired to write GTA. I am sure that was part of it. That was after we wrote and directed Crank, so I got involved with GTA pretty heavily, I didn't grow up with it.
Neveldine claims that it was a "rights issue" that caused the silver screen adaptation of GTA to founder. "It was a movie originally directed by Ron Howard ... and because Rockstar Games made a video game, there is some battle of who can use the title ... you can't make it about the game." Back in 2008, Variety alleged that a GTA movie was on the precipice of production when the deal fell through, but we get the feeling that these folks are speaking about something completely different. Starting its new video game blog off with a bang, Variety reports that last spring a Grand Theft Auto movie was almost ready to roll into full production. The story goes that after years of trying, some studio actually navigated the bureaucracy of Take-Two/Rockstar and was ready to start production -- "quite possibly" with Eminem as the star. The reason this even came to be after so many years of stonewalling by GTA's rights holders is that current Take-Two chair, Strauss Zelnick, comes from traditional media at BMG music and 20th Century Fox.

Variety goes on to say that the movie was so close to being finalized that its own reporters were prepping stories, with sources at Take-Two saying it was a done deal. At the last moment though, the whole thing fell allegedly apart after the publisher couldn't finalize terms with the studio. Whether it was an issue about money or giving away the movie rights (Rockstar is very protective of its brand) is still an unanswered question. Oh well, we've gotten used to movies based on modern mega-franchise games falling a part.