Following Illumination Entertainment and Nintendo announcing their pending deal to create a Super Mario Bros. movie, another gaming franchise is being considered for feature film treatment. Blizzard Entertainment has expressed support for a movie based on its wildly popular first-person online shooter Overwatch, which first launched in May of 2016.
The main driver behind a possible Overwatch movie is the success of the game’s animated short films, which further the story or offer character exposition in ways that can’t be done via gameplay. There have been eight shorts released thus far, all boasting high production values and animation that rivals that of Pixar. Several of the shorts have even played in theaters as part of game launch events.
Fans have been asking for a full Overwatch movie ever since the first cinematic trailer was released, and now Blizzard has confirmed it would like to make that a reality.
“We would like that very much,” Tim Kilpin, president and CEO of Activision Blizzard, told MCVUK in a recent interview. “These franchises exist across multiple platforms, so it’s not just the game as a driver, but it’s linear content [movies and TV] as a way to expand the audience.”
With more than 35 million players of the game, an animated Overwatch movie would certainly not be lacking an audience. However, the questionable quality of past video game-to-film adaptations – Warcraft, Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia, etc. – may lead to some hesitation.
Before any work would begin on an Overwatch movie however, Activision is looking into a possible Call of Duty film, based on the first-person shooter of the same name. “Anytime you take a franchise as storied as this, with this kind of legacy, and expand it into a new form factor you have to be really careful,” said Kilpin. “So frankly, if the script and the story isn’t right, we won’t do it.” Fans can hope that the same philosophy would be applied to an Overwatch film if greenlit.
In the meantime, Blizzard still has several more Overwatch animated shorts planned for the near future, to further flesh out various characters’ origin stories. If these shorts continue to be successful, there may yet be a longer animated Overwatch story in our future.
Via Digital Trends.
