Don't expect a Red Dead Redemption movie anytime soon: Take-Two boss says the film industry is 'a really hard business' and he's not looking to rush into it

pcgamer.com:

There was a time, not all that long ago, when movies based on videogames were surefire losers. The reasons varied, but the bottom line was the same: It just never worked out. In more recent times, though, that situation has turned around dramatically: The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a major hit, while The Last of Us—an HBO series rather than a film, but close enough—earned universal critical and commercial acclaim.

In light of that, you might think that Take-Two Interactive—home to game series including Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, XCOM, Mafia, Midnight Club, and Max Payne, all rife with cinematic potential—might harbor some movie-making ambitions of its own. But during today's quarterly investors call, CEO Strauss Zelnick—who actually served as CEO of 20th Century Fox back in the early '90s—said that's actually not the case at all because film and television projects are too risky for the «relatively small [economic] opportunity» they represent. 

Zelnick said the runaway (and, I would say, somewhat surprising) success of the Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Last of Us indirectly highlights the fact that «there are many, many failures where money was lost.» Take-Two does currently have a pair of game-based films in the works, Borderlands and BioShock, and Zelnick said it's possible that more such projects could happen in the future. But he said that the company will continue to take «a very selective approach to licensing,» and will only do so «where there's a creative imperative and an economic opportunity.»

There have been other recent videogame-to-video success stories in recent years, including Arcane, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, The Witcher, and Halo, all of which have earned positive receptions and relatively