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GTA Movie Situation

By Chris Bennett, Tudor Carsten, Michael R. Coburn, Sarah Dale-Harris, Pablo Guzman, Danielle (Dani) Lemon, Chris Metcalfe and David Spratley

There have been a number of movies in recent years based on video game properties (e.g, Hitman, Doom, etc.) Even though Take Two's Grand Theft Auto series of games is wildly popular, however, it's unlikely that there will be a "Grand Theft Auto" movie based on the game.

The reason is that Fox Atomic owns the rights to a 1977 movie (directed by Ron Howard) called "Grand Theft Auto". And an agreement between Fox and Take Two says that Fox will not make a video game based on its movie property, and Take Two will not make a movie based on its video game property.

Of course, this is probably just a straight branding issue -- Take Two can probably make a movie based on GTA IV so long as it's not called "Grand Theft Auto".

This is not breaking news, but the situation highlights how complicated branding, cross-marketing and derivative work issues can be in the video game and entertainment media context.

Coverage at GameDaily.com.

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Full post as published by Video Game Law Blog on July 03, 2008 (boomark / email).