Games and movies are rushing to jump into bed while they’re still getting to know each other | Opinion

I have just returned from a whirlwind two days flitting around the London Games Festival, which is rumbling on until the end of this week, with events like New Game Plus and the BAFTA Games Awards still to come.

Much of my time was spent nosing around the Games Finance Market – where the mood was refreshingly ebullient considering the parlous state of games funding over the past few years – along with some stops at the Self-Publishing Toolkit and Games For Change events, which offered some generally useful and inspiring advice. But by far the highlight was Screen Play at BFI Southbank, which did a great job of framing the current excitement around games being turned into films and TV shows, as well as pointing to some of the teething troubles both parties are facing.

Screen Play is now in its third year, and one attendee reckoned there were about twice as many people attending compared to 2025 – which gives a measure of just how much interest there is in transmedia right now.

Adrian Wootton, CEO of Film London, opened by highlighting how many game-based film and TV projects are in the works, including A24’s adaptation of Elden Ring, which is being written and directed by Alex Garland, and which has just started shooting in the UK. In a panel discussion afterwards, Helene Juguet, managing director of film and TV at Ubisoft, said that nearly 25% of all movies being made in the next few years are based on video games (although I presume that statistic pertains only to Hollywood movies). That seems like an extraordinarily high percentage, but if true, we can expect a glut of game movies in the years to come, much like we experienced a deluge of comic book movies a decade or so ago.

During the same panel, Mark Maslowicz, vice president of partnerships and investments at Tencent, added that the faithfulness of game-based movies is also improving because game companies now have more say in the process. “I think in the past when maybe the power balance was different, Hollywood would pick a game and make their version of it, and maybe stray too far from the source material,” he said – a statement that caused images of Dennis Hopper as King Koopa to form unbidden in my mind. “And I think as gaming has become a bigger business in its own right, I think gaming companies are now doing a better job of keeping creative control.”

There’s clearly a gold rush for game properties in Hollywood, and there’s no doubt that the increasing games literacy of the directors and writers involved in these projects has helped to improve the quality of the offerings we receive. Today’s filmmakers have often grown up playing games themselves – Genki Kawamura, director of the recently released Exit 8, being a case in point.

Yet there still remains a disconnect between the worlds of games and films. At the top of the Hollywood food chain, executives still might have only the vaguest ideas of what games are about. In the final session of the day, Dmitri M. Johnson, co-founder of the production company Story Kitchen – which specialises in adapting video games to film and TV, and which lists among its many projects the new Tomb Raider TV show and the Sonic the Hedgehog movies – told an anecdote about former Legendary TV president Nick Pepper, who is now at Amazon Studios. “He said, ‘I do not understand games. I probably will never understand games. But I believe that you guys believe it’s the future, and I’m going to bet on that.'” Hollywood wants the audiences that games have built; it doesn’t comprehend how they built them.

This gulf of understanding was highlighted most clearly by Simon Pulman, a partner at the New York law firm Pryor Cashman, in his talk about making movie deals for gaming IP. Pulman terrified everyone in the room by explaining that simply replying to an email about a film contract with something along the lines of, “Yes, that sounds good” could be considered as legally binding acceptance of the contract under Californian law. But beyond that unsettling mic drop moment, he gave a fascinating run down of just how different expectations are between the movie and games industries.

Pulman explained that the bread and butter of Hollywood is book adaptations, and the standards for deal making are all built around that. He gave an example in which an author might be paid $100,000 for the option to make a film of their book, and a further $1 million if the movie is actually made. Those could be life-changing sums for an author, but utterly negligible for a games company with a multi-million-selling hit.

Similarly, the standard Hollywood deal typically sees the movie studio gaining all of the rights around an IP – including rights for merchandising, music publishing, stage adaptations, location-based entertainment, podcasts, and so on, and possibly even the rights to make video games based on the property. Naturally, this would be a horrifying prospect for a games firm.

Pulman said that games companies and movie studios are having to learn to adapt to each other’s way of doing business. Games firms are having to accommodate the fact that films take an extraordinarily long time to make, and often don’t get off the ground until the director and stars are secured, which can be complicated by clashing schedules. They might also have to live with the fact that they will have to give up at least some rights to get a deal over the line and make the production worthwhile for the movie company.

“Games companies and movie studios are having to learn to adapt to each other’s way of doing business”

Film studios, meanwhile, are having to come to terms with the idea that when it comes to gaming IP, they might not be able to have the full control they’re used to on a movie project.

As Maslowicz said, the power balance has changed. Once, the games world worshipped at the feet of movies, but now games and films are on a more or less even footing. The two worlds are poles apart in many respects, unused to dealing with each other’s mysterious habits and ways of working. But both are keen to work with each other – and the success of the Mario and Minecraft movies in particular shows just how lucrative such partnerships can be.

There’s still a learning curve to the relationship, however. We’re well past the stage of initial attraction, but there’s a lot left to find out about each other.