Todd Howard, executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios where he’s shepherded video games such as “Fallout 4” and “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” was asked during a lengthy interview with GamesIndustry.biz why there hasn’t been a film adaptation of a Bethesda property yet, and why there aren’t any on the horizon either.
Howard said there has been interest from Hollywood, but Bethesda has turned them all down because it is very protective of its brands and “nothing quite clicked.” If it were to greenlight a movie, it would have to be done exactly the way the company wanted it done.
“I’ve taken a number of meetings over the years and nothing quite clicked where I felt, ‘Oh, that would be as good as the game.’ And that may happen,” Howard said. “I don’t rule it out, but nothing really has clicked where — the games are popular enough and that’s their identity. ‘Fallout 4,’ if there had been a ‘Fallout’ movie, you’d feel different about ‘Fallout’ when we’d announced ‘Fallout 4’ and one of them wouldn’t be quite right and you wouldn’t want that to be the game, where the movie takes it in another direction.”
“Fallout 4” was one of the biggest-selling games of 2015, and the first big franchise release for Bethesda’s internal game development studio since “Skyrim” in 2011. So naturally the question of a blockbuster film adaptation of one of their properties is again popping up regularly.
That a game developer would be cautious with regards to an adaptation of a property is not a new thing for the industry. Blizzard and Ubisoft, two of the biggest game publishers in the world, actually are producing their own big-budget film versions of “Warcraft” and “Assassin’s Creed,” respectively.
