Name: Filmmakers are battling for gaming's top names | The Dip Podcast
Uploaded: 2026-03-10T17:01:06.000Z
Duration: 14 min 18 s
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Gaming culture allows a broad variety of storylines that we haven't seen before.

Hollywood is discovering this trove of ip, this intellectual property.

It indicates to me sort of the lack of innovation in the Hollywood side.

You see a revitalization of game sales because the TV series just reminds people of their favorite franchise.

Instead of making games and making movies, what we're really doing is making audiences, especially in the recent years.

Why is Hollywood now like so obsessed with adapting games into movies?

We've just been beaten to death with all these superhero movies.

People are totally tired, grown men with capes and their underwear on the outside and they're just ready for something else.

And gaming, or gaming culture allows a broad variety of storylines that we haven't seen before.

And so Hollywood is discovering this trove of ip, this intellectual property that they haven't been able to leverage in the past and that now becomes incredibly valuable.

The previous understanding, or my understanding, was that you had a movie that kind of became the center of an IP universe, right?

You would have the Clueless movie come out, for example, and

then you had games that came out around it, whether they were computer games or, you know, card games or something like that, or merch that went around it.

Now it seems like anything's fair game if there's a fan base around it that could become the center of the IP universe and then you could make a movie out of it.

Because I'm also thinking of like Pirates of the Caribbean.

That's a ride in the, in Disney world in the US and then it became a whole movie franchise, for example.

So yes, it used to be sort of an additional form of revenue where I was like, oh, we have this thing, let's just sell off the rights and somebody's gonna make a crappy movie and maybe make a couple of bucks.

If you look at the economics up until like 2010, that was a great way to end your career as a film director because there is just a string of like non profitable movies.

It's like you would even like franchises that worked well.

They end up underwater by 2010, the franchise become more valuable and the audience drives more, you know, comes out in droves and they start spending more.

All of a sudden it starts to turn around and then it becomes a viable form of entertainment.

The only exception here is the Pokemon movies.

They now have, I think, 23 full feature films each 90 minutes long that always break even and make a profit.

That's their thing on a global scale, you know, it's turned around.

And so in many ways, the film industry and the games industry have found each other.

But rather than having accretive revenue or additional money coming in through these franchises and merch events, now it's part of this flywheel, right?

It's become incredibly large and also cluttered.

If I'm not playing the game, then maybe I can go watch the game or.

Or I can go online and discuss the game with other people.

So there's all these other activities surrounding it.

And film has taken a very notable piece of this.

You see a revitalization of game sales because the TV series just reminds people of their favorite franchise, whether that's the Last of Us, whether that's Fallout.

So it becomes part of a flywheel rather than just a little bit extra money on the tail end, casting your mind back to the past.

Yost, why did games movies historically fail compared to how successful they are today?

Yeah, so the history of the games industry at the box office is terrible.

And so it just has always been this venture where people go like, okay, don't do this.

The reason was because they didn't know very well.

So famously, I mentioned the 1983 adaptation of Super Mario Bros.

With Dennis Hopper, allegedly Dennis Hopper, as famous as he was, never even looked at the script or the IP or really bothered to know who Bowser was.

Like the bad guy, the arch nemesis of Super Mario.

And so you get a creative industry that is totally disconnected from the actual text, from the actual culture of the games industry.

And so as a result, they just make movies.

You know, I'm wondering, I'm of two minds of this, right?

One part of me is like, Hollywood's just milking this nostalgia machine.

They're doing the same thing that like these reboots are doing right now, like the reboot of Harry Potter, for example, or the Barbie movie, right?

Like, just milking this idea that people grew up with and trying to turn it into profit now.

But then the other part of me is looking at, for example, the Last of Us.

Maybe that was a story that a few years ago the gaming industry was just willing to tell, and

And now that Hollywood can see, oh, okay, actually

people do like this game and like the queer characters, for example, that are centered there, they're like, okay, now somebody else has taken the risk, we're ready to take the risk.

So the, in general terms, I've always looked at it as to say that the games industry is, in the stories that it tells, is able to go beyond sort of like the classic Disney narratives.

You know, like every, like it's only recently that we stopped rescuing princesses.

I have a 4 year old daughter and so I am all the way up on all of the frozen lore.

But that's a very relatively new development in sort of traditional Hollywood cinema.

Whether that's animation for children or otherwise, the games industry offers a much wider range of narratives and storylines.

And it, and it's because it borrows on animation, it borrows from the comic book industry.

And so it's just a different set of storylines that now suddenly become relevant.

In the case of the Last of Us, for instance, or having a different set of values and representations in gaming, I think that that is precisely why Hollywood has embraced it because it allows them to tell those stories, but

still sort of borrow the fact that, well, it's gaming, so it's sort of like this other space and we can borrow stories from that.

We can have different, you know, heroes that lead the narrative as opposed to that we must stay true to somebody wearing a dress and a ball gown to save the day.

It can be something more gritty, it can be something that tells a story that we haven't heard before.

And I would add to that that the games industry, unlike say the storytelling that you see in Hollywood, tends to be much more global, tends to cater to a global audience.

And so there is much more influence from say Japan.

And Japan, if you've ever watched any anime, that is an experience all of its own.

I mean, it's just aesthetically different.

But you see the narratives kind of progress.

And so the way to button this, for instance, is to say a phenomenon like the Hunger Games fight, which is the series of books, it's been made into movies that has also been popularized by games like Fortnite, where you sort of have last person standing wins.

But that's something that comes from the manga culture, from Japan.

so you can draw this red line from all the way to Japan, every Western audience saying like this is an idea, it's a concept, it's a wave storyteller that would have never emerged from the west, but

And now through gaming it travels much further and it becomes all of its own and narrative economy.

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Filmmakers are battling for gaming's top names | The Dip Podcast

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