The DeanBeat: Joe Russo and Donald Mustard interview — Hollywood’s new game-centric focus

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Gaming is the new Hollywood. Or so that is the latest interpretation now that games like Uncharted are supplying the themes and plots for blockbuster movies.

At the Dice Summit in Las Vegas, we heard that this week from Joe Russo, co-creator of Marvel’s The Avengers movies, and Donald Mustard, chief creative officer at Epic Games and one of the leaders of Fornite. Mustard’s company has invested in Agbo, the latest entertainment company formed by the Russo brothers (Joe and Anthony). They gave a talk and I interviewed them afterward.

Transmedia is alive and well in Hollywood, but now it’s moving in the reverse direction. Instead of movies supplying the stories for games, it’s the other way around now. Russo said that he fully believes that the interactivity of games is going to be more compelling for fans of the future.

Agbo recently raised $400 million from online game company Nexon at a $1.1 billion valuation. Epic Games also invested in Agbo, which is putting together new kinds of entertainment, and it is designing them simultaneously for different media.

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Russo also took questions from the audience and found, oddly, that a question about nonfungible tokens (NFTs) was intriguing to him because it represented a kind of generational change to him. But I found his interest in games, the metaverse, and the changing of entertainment to be the most interesting topics.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: What did you think of the audience questions?

Joe Russo: The NFT question is probably the most interesting, because what does that represent ultimately? It represents