GTA movie or TV show? Take-Two boss says 'we don't rule it out, but we're very, very selective'

A Grand Theft Auto film or TV series could still happen one day, says Strauss Zelnick, the boss of Take-Two, the company that owns Rockstar. “We don’t rule it out, but we’re very, very selective,” he told The David Rubenstein Show, GamesRadar+ reports. The interview went online on November 12. It was recorded on October 19 in New York, the video’s description says.

Why there is still no GTA film

Rubenstein asked why GTA has never been made into a film or a show. Zelnick said Take-Two is very careful about taking its games into other media. It is a creative company, he said, and it wants to make the best entertainment in the world.

Take-Two would make a film or a series if its creative teams were passionate about one, and believed it would delight players. Zelnick called that “a high bar”, and said a project like that can always fail.

GamesRadar+ notes that the closest thing so far is The Gamechangers, a 2015 drama about Rockstar’s legal fight with lawyer Jack Thompson, with Daniel Radcliffe as Sam Houser. Rockstar did not like it.

“We never claim success before it occurs”

Zelnick would not call GTA 6 a hit before launch. He said GTA 5 has sold more than 230 million copies. He also said Take-Two believes GTA is “probably the most valuable intellectual property in the entertainment business”, because it reaches so many people around the world.

He is “very optimistic” about Rockstar’s work, he said, but GTA 6’s success will have to wait “until November 19 and beyond”.

Take-Two is not for sale

Rubenstein also asked if Take-Two would sell itself, as two of its biggest rivals have done. GamesRadar+ says the two are almost certainly EA and Activision Blizzard. EA was bought for $55 billion by a group of investors led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, GameSpot notes.

Zelnick made clear he is not interested. Take-Two has shown it can do well on its own, he said, and it does not need to be part of a bigger group to compete. Below about $1 billion a year in sales, he explained, an entertainment company struggles to build strong creative teams, sell worldwide and survive the flops that always come. Past that point, growing bigger does not seem to help much, and Take-Two is “way beyond” it.

GTA 6 comes out on November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Our FAQ has the unlock time where you live. For what Zelnick told investors on November 9, read our earlier story.