Hollywood has finally cracked the code on making movies based on video games, at least from a box-office perspective. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy, and A Minecraft Movie have grossed billions combined since 2020. Whether they’re good movies is up for debate. Critically, TV seems to be where game adaptations are shining; Fallout and The Last of Us are legit prestige television, likely in part due to the close creative involvement of the people who make those games and producers who adore the source material.
Two producers fighting to improve the quality of video game adaptations are Dmitri M. Johnson and Mike Goldberg, otherwise known as Story Kitchen. They’ve been working for years to make game adaptations better, or at a bare minimum, more authentic to creators’ visions and to the people who play those games. Story Kitchen’s work includes the Sonic the Hedgehog film franchise, the first film of which was famously delayed in response to fan criticism but wound up winning fans over.
In recent years, Story Kitchen’s Goldberg and Johnson have gone into overdrive, locking down movie and TV deals for adaptations based on Tomb Raider, It Takes Two, Streets of Rage, and Just Cause. But the production company is just getting started, Goldberg and Johnson tell Polygon. In addition to getting indies into the mix, with upcoming adaptations of games like Sifu and Dredge, Story Kitchen is developing at least 10 projects for Sega in the wake of Sonic’s success.
Polygon recently spoke to Goldberg and Johnson about their production company and what it’s working on — which includes a few surprises still to be announced. Read on for our full conversation, which has been edited for clarity.
Mike Goldberg: We launched the production company [for] film and TV two and a half years ago. We specialize in sourcing, partnering, and working to adapt nontraditional IP into film and TV. When we say “nontraditional IP,” we are referring to video game IP. How this all came about was primarily off the heels of dj2 Entertainment, [which] Dmitri launched with the same thesis in mind. It was early days, and video game adaptations weren’t really a thing. They were attacked in the press. They were attacked in the media. Fans weren’t responding, and Dmitri didn’t believe, he thought a meaningful way was a field trip to Japan to finagle a meeting with the C-suite of Sega and to discuss with Sega their thoughts on finally unlocking [Sonic the Hedgehog] for film.
At the time it was not at the top of their bucket list, but after years of campaigning […] now we have the Sonic franchise.
Fast-forward to launching Story Kitchen: I resigned from my agency to do it with Dmitri. Thanks to him, I was the No. 1 agent for video game IP into film and TV. I think I had 80 deals done from repping Atari, Square Enix, and Bandai Namco to the Tomb Raider deal — twice over as first we sold animated Tomb Raider in 2019 […] and the live-action franchise built at Amazon […] the Phoebe Waller-Bridge live-action tentpole series that’s in pre-production.
[Ed. note: After our interview, reports have suggested that Waller-Bridge’s live-action Tomb Raider project is no longer moving forward at Amazon. We checked in with Story Kitchen, which said, “The show is not dead and still tracking forward.”]
So to that end, we have an Amazon television first-look deal and a DreamWorks Animation film first-look deal. We’re external consultants, if you will. We have these shortcuts, but it’s great because we get additional intel and support if there’s a game that makes sense to bring into them.
We love our indies, we love our AAAs, and it’s having the pleasure of working with everyone from Poncle with Vampire Survivors to Black Salt Games with Dredge. This conversation came out of Sifu, and that was such an extraordinary experience. We sold that game as a movie to Netflix during the double strikes of 2023. The writers and the actors were on the picket lines, and we’re like, OK, we can’t do much, but we’re talking to Netflix and [told them], Hey, there’s this game that’s extraordinary from a very young game developer and a very young game publisher, Sloclap and Kepler. And within less than five business days, they’re like, I love it. Let’s do it as a movie.
Matchbox right now. It should be, if timing aligns, his next movie.
Ruiner, the indie game that we’re doing with Wes Ball, who directed all the Maze Runner movies and did [Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes] and is going to do [The Legend of Zelda] — we have a draft.
Those are things that are announced. Then there’s things that haven’t been announced, but when they’re announced, they’ll be announced with speed. They’re primarily TV-facing, but they’re huge, break-the-internet type of announcements that our nerdoms are exploding on — and we can’t believe it hasn’t leaked. Then there’s the new things we’re putting together. We are so close to getting our Vampire Survivors package out and our Dredge package out. Our last 24 hours have been consumed [by] Hazelight’s new game, Split Fiction, that has done extraordinarily well since the game came out. We are in the middle of it with Hazelight, [and] we have a massive [meeting] in a few minutes with someone who could be one of the two characters for the movie. It’s unbelievable.
One of the projects we’re most excited about is with Brooklyn’s own (by way of London) Sam Barlow. We’re putting together Her Story, which is a passion project.
Goldberg: Sam is so unbelievable as a game developer. [We think] it should be a movie, as a tight, twisty concept. It’s an intimate movie, and we’ve been building our village for that.
The post The era of the bad video game movie is over, if Hollywood lets these guys do their job appeared first on Polygon.
