N'Gai Croal
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Jul 31, 2007 09:56 AM
John Woo's Stranglehold, from Midway Home Entertainment
Last month, as we were working on our exclusive story about two of the three games being developed in collaboration by Steven Spielberg and Electronic Arts Los Angeles, we spoke with some other industry executives about the continuing dance between Hollywood and the videogame industry. A lot of our reporting was left on the cutting room floor; thankfully, the staff of Level Up has an outlet to bring you some of those deleted scenes. One of the execs we contacted with was Steve Allison, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer for Midway Home Entertainment, who previously contributed one of our blog's most buzzed-about guest essays about what developers must do to improve their games. We asked him about his company's creative partnerships with Hollywood talent; its licensing deals with movie studios; and Midway's own properties that are being adapted for the big screen. Here's what Allison told us via e-mail:
What is the difference--creatively, financially and otherwise--when working on a games like The Ant Bully and Happy Feet, which are presumably straightforward licensing deals, and games like John Woo's Stranglehold and The Wheelman with Vin Diesel, which are more along the lines of financial partnerships?
They both have what I would call traditional licensing terms. So financially, deals like Stranglehold, Wheelman or Happy Feet frankly aren't that different, they are in fact essentially the same. The difference between Wheelman, Stranglehold and our similar other projects is that these projects are true creative partnerships--we look to bring the talents of our partnerships to bear on our final product. The thesis is the talent we've chosen to align with brings something creatively relevant to the videogame space. For these particular franchises--Wheelman, Stranglehold and a couple of others we have yet to announce (and won't until 2008)--we look to bring their creative process and ours together so that the end product is something special, more so than it would have been if we'd just cooked it up ourselves. We also match the partner and the project so they make sense based on the partner's body of film or creative work. Net net, we're looking for perfect genre alignment.
These are not joint ventures or financial partnerships. At the development costs we have, we can't work outside of the traditional licensing framework for the game without making it an impossible project to cost justify. What we have done with these projects that is very unique is that we give certain rights outside the gaming space to our partners in perpetuity, like the film rights. These rights have real financial and emotional value to our partners and in fact are proving to be very motivational as a working mechanic. Our partners are passionate about building these properties for us, so it works as a game for us, and for them it could also work as a film.
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