Hollywood & Games: notes from Thomas Tull & Mitch Davis

These two are big, savvy, besuited, money guys. The amount of cash they clearly have to do their projects is fairly terrifying: Legendary Pictures, Thomas' company, just did a billion dollar deal with Warner Bros for a slate of movies. Hoo-ee.

I'm all behind them, they did Batman Begins and 300, although interestingly they see themselves as a company geared towards entertainment for guys primarily. I say interestingly, what I actually mean is annoyingly. Or stereotypically. There was a ton of casual sexism in this morning's opening, from the clueless lady (shame on her!) from Hollywood Reporter simpering that the majority of the female gamer demographic "are probably just playing solitaire or something", to the chaps referring to Hollywood and the talent within it as "just a bunch of guys who grew up on games", and only referencing male characters, male directors, male genres, male game designers and male biz teams.

We all know there is a giant, living, active market for games that appeal beyond just men, but it's not being referenced here today, even though racing and horror genres have both been mentioned, and both perform well with women gamers. Hollywood knows how to reach women - either through romance or deep drama, or horror and teen shopping/shagging movies, or .. you know, the list really isn't as short as 'romantic' for women and 'violent' for men.

It bothers me so much that people of both sexes are so often polarised in this casually thoughtless way. People are far more interesting and complex than their age and sex, both metrics of which carry hard-to-scrape-off casual discrimination built-in.

Anyway. I'll go have a cup of tea and a deep breath. Here's some notes on what they said in their opening speeches:

Thomas: I’m thrilled, as an avid gamer, to give this speech.

Can’t believe I get to make movies like we do, and now I get to talk about Brash. We’re at an amazing crossroads, from tech and storytelling standpoints, and it’s the right time for these mediums to work more closely together.

 Legendary pix tends to focus on edgy and driven. We tend to do movies that we want to see: cool, speaks to an audience here and abroad. It’s probably a bit more male – action, horror, etc.

Few words about games: when I was growing up, they were in arcades. We bought an Atari, I had that ET game, very exciting at the time, but.. now .. When I think about what videogames means now, and my little girl is on a PSP, and I have 60 year old friends who are playing tennis on the Wii. It’s amazing what that machine has done. The idea of videogamers being guys in basements is well behind us. The videogame business is formidable in terms of growth and global reach.

The category of videogames has been expanding. So, the genesis of Brash: I was introduced to Mitch Davis, and the thought was, how can you put together a videogame company  - this is not to fix anything that’s broken, by the way, despite some of the journalism – but one of the low-hanging fruits are movie based games. It’s a jumpstart on your slate, so we’re focusing on that. As an investor in the company it’s a very strong management team. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up doing original IP in the future.

We have capital. Games are looking like movies in terms of the advertising cost, and the cost of putting them together, so having a warchest is important. When you talk about why videogames based on movies have a deserved bad rap: there are some based on movies that I don’t think should be made.

Not everything translates.

It’s a dangerous thing to take a brand and slap it on a box and expect people to buy it. And when those sell anyway, it leads to laziness on our part. Videogames have been treated like lunchboxes and teeshirts, as licenses properties, instead of having the FX and lighting and creative guys sitting at the table from day one. That day has come.

It takes longer to develop a game than a movie once it’s greenlit. If you wait until greenlight, you’re out of time; it’s a bad sitch. We don’t’ have a magic bullet here: there are a number of incremental steps that you can try to take to move the needle a bit. The tech and platforms now mean we can move a bit more quickly, plus on the movie side, the talent wants to be involved now. Big name directors.

Getting involved at an earlier stage: we have some insight, maybe if it’s under suspicion of being a movie, you can prototype. You can research. And with all the tech and special effects on either side, we’re in the story telling business. My favourite game right now is Gears of War; I worship at the altar of Cliffy B right now. It’s a great story, compelling graphics.. If we can incorporate storytelling seamlessly into games, that’s an exciting platform.

You have to make great games. We clearly understand the legacy of movie based games. We know it’s hard. We’re going to have to earn our reputation here. We have to raise the level of our play.

The other thing I want to talk about here, this is Hollywood and Games, we mentioned WoW movie. I have very strong feelings from the movie side, making games into movies just because they sold well, pretty bad idea. What we look for, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a graphic novel, or a television show, if there’s a great mythology and story and a jumping off point that we can use in that world, well that’s really interesting. Warcraft: yes it’s interesting that 8m play, but if those guys all bought three tickets each, we’d still be in trouble. We got excited because of the depth of the story.

We’re at an exciting crossroads. Taking these mediums, these talented people, given where we are today, using that... we can have a good outcome.

Mitch: we’ve had fun putting Brash together. Here’s what we’re doing. It’s my second foray into games; I founded Massive Inc in 2002. I had the idea while playing games in my living room. I was playing Vice City, set in a facsimile of Miami, and there are fake billboards all over the game. I thought, wow. We can change that realtime. We can help reach that hardtoreach 18-34 male audience.

This is a very good time to be a gamer. It’s a good time to be in the business. I played a lot of the games built around movies; some are great, some are not so great. The top 5 in the SFC was Raiders, Jurassic Park, LOTR, Golden Eye, and the Chronicles of Riddick. The notion there with Riddick was that the game was better. Riddick is more fun to be Riddick, rather than watching Riddick.

It’s a great time to be in the biz: 15-20 growth over the next 2-4 years; ever expanding market, a larger and larger audience. There is a large and growing female audience. The BBC did some research last year that showed that 100% of 11-19 year olds play games.

[Alice's note: this is a misquote: although the figure is likely to be close, it's actually 100% of 6-10 year olds, 97% of 11-15, and 82% of 16-24, although the younger someone is the more likely it is they'll be a gamer, so he's probably not super far off. Grab it here].

It’s always about innovation. Will Wright, Cliffy B... this creative currency is driving this industry. Creativity has always been a bankable asset in Hollywood, so we’re excited about bringing these two areas together. We believe that if you get the best talent from both and put them together to make games, you’ll get high quality out.

With Riddick, they had time, and a great story, and a great character. I’m a great fan of this game, and it’s one of the examples we can point to. When you think about the characters out in the marketplace... there’s been a lot of interest in games from Hollywood. There are a lot of guys in there who grew up as gamers.

We announced the franchise with Saw a few weeks ago: the game community jumped around and agreed it was an interesting idea. We’re excited about that; it’ll come out in the next 18 months.

We have over 40 licenses that we’ll be making games out of over the next 5 years. If you put as much care and attention into selecting the development studio as you do the DoP and director on the movie side, you’ll get a great game. We have the finances and resources to be able to make quality, and we have distribution with WB in USA and EU, and they understand about being a leader in that space.

If we can produce high quality, the market will gravitate towards us.