Pete Hines, Bethesda's Vice President of Public Relations and Marketing, suggests that one famous director could make a The Elder Scrolls movie a real possibility.
Video game movies have been a hot topic over the past few months. Ever since the success of the Warcraft film that released earlier this year, gamers and cinephiles alike have debated the viability of video games making the leap from television screens to silver ones. That discussion spawned rumors over the possibility of a Red Dead Redemption movie that were only recently shot down, with more and more studios having deny interest in making a film out of one of their cherished IPs.
That doesn't mean that developers aren't interested in diving into the world of cinema, however - it just means that they're being particularly protective of the games they've worked very hard to make popular. Bethesda's Pete Hines shone some light on just how valuable developers consider their IPs to be, stating in an interview with Finder.com.au that it's less about the ability to make a movie and more about what Bethesda would get out of it. Fear of the movie negatively impacting people's opinion of a series as critical as The Elder Scrolls, for instance, is a big motivator for staying away from film, but Hines did offer up a caveat:
"I think if Peter Jackson turned up at Todd Howard's office and said, 'I want to do The Elder Scrolls', well that would be a pretty serious conversation...but I think Peter is probably pretty busy."
Perhaps the only reason Hines had to comment on the possibility of a movie in the first place is due to the news that The Elder Scrolls 6 currently isn't in development. While that makes sense given that Fallout 4 only released less than a year ago and Bethesda has been hard at work on other projects, the production of a movie has been cited as the reason a popular video game series took a hiatus from development before. Ubisoft went on record as saying that not making a new Assassin's Creed game this year was to make the movie better, and some fans took the status of The Elder Scrolls 6 as an indication of a similar approach.
Hines also suggested that Bethesda is extremely well-positioned to make a movie if it ever decides it wants to. Jerry Bruckheimer is on Bethesda parent company ZeniMax's board of directors, an incredible resource that most studios simply couldn't hope to have access to. That being said, however, Bethesda still remains focused on producing new and engaging video game content, the latest of which will be the Elder Scrolls: Legends online card game due out later this year.
Still, it's hard to imagine a better fit for The Elder Scrolls than Peter Jackson. In many ways, Bethesda's RPG series is the gaming world's version of the epic, long tale told by The Lord of the Rings, and if Jackson ever has the itch to return to that kind of story-telling once more, it appears Todd Howard and the rest of Bethesda would be happy to give him a narrative worth exploring.
Would you check out an Elder Scrolls movie if it were released eventually? Do you think big-time directors like Peter Jackson would be willing to produce a video game film? Let us know in the comments below.