Inside a converted flower warehouse off a scruffy street in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, the world’s largest computer games company is preparing its latest assault on the world’s screens.
On Friday, Skylanders Academy, a CGI animation based on a $3bn (£2.5bn) combined video game/toy franchise aimed at pre-teens, will hit Netflix.
It is the first release from Activision Blizzard Studios, a division of the gaming behemoth behind titles including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Destiny, set up last year to take games to TV and screen.
Activision animation partner TeamTO __have 160 people working on the project at its headquarters in the French capital and a second site in the south of France.
The TeamTO director general and founder, Guillaume Hellouin, says the resources were roughly equivalent to those needed for a CGI film. “It’s probably the most ambitious TV series we __have had the chance to work on,” he said. “It’s close to feature film quality in terms of image sophistication.”
Skylanders has signed up a cast of high-class voice actors. The lead, a purple dragon called Spyro, who first appeared as a video game character in 1998, is voiced by Justin Long, best known for starring in Dodgeball, and one Spyro’s best friends, a walking pile of rock and magma called Eruptor, is played by Breaking Bad’s Jonathan Banks. Oscar-winner Susan Sarandon voices a villain called the Golden Queen.
The crossover between video games and TV and film is nothing new. From DuckTales on the NES console in the early 1990s, via Bob Hoskins in the movie Super Mario Brothers in 1993, to the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed film starring Michael Fassbender, traffic between the mediums has been busy. There are even plans to make a series of films based on Tetris.
But what is new is the way in which Activison is bringing overall control inside the business, rather than licensing others to do the work and take most of the risk.
Coco Francini, the vice-president of development at Activision Studios and Skylanders producer, says: “I think that a lot of companies licence out their intellectual property, and obviously we are not doing that.
“We are accountable to the standards of excellence of the entire company ... and we work with the people who make the games, we know the DNA of what makes them successful by talking to those people and meeting with those studios.”
Activision has brought in big names to oversee the project. The co-president, Stacey Sher, has produced critically acclaimed films including Erin Brockovich and Matilda, and worked alongside Francini, whose credits include Django Unchained, with Quentin Tarantino. Her co-president Nick van Dyk is a former Disney executive who played a key role in acquiring Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars for the studio.
The approach suggests a desire to avoid the mistakes of the past, which Sher acknowledges. “People are always looking for great intellectual property. And I think coming from my background in film and television that the places where I’ve imagined people don’t always get it right is also investing in character.
“Character is the thing that puts you into the best of filmed entertainment, character and storytelling.”
Those mistakes are reflected in the more miss than hit record of computer game adaptations. World of Warcraft, based on Activision’s online role playing game, was critically panned and lost a reported $15m on a budget of $160m. It was only saved from complete financial failure by a strong showing in China. But there are other reasons to want to be more directly involved.
Prof Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology says: “You could say they are doing this to maintain better creative control. Exert more creative force. They might also be doing that so they can own more of that profit chain. Especially since the mechanics of Hollywood deals are so backwards and complicated.”
Activision’s next project after Skylanders is a film version of the Call of Duty franchise, which has made more than $10bn worldwide.
Despite the success of titles such as Call of Duty and wider penetration of gaming into the mainstream, Bogost thinks Activision will still have difficulty escaping the snobbery that stops it going beyond a core audience, in part because the games that have truly broken into the mainstream do not lend themselves to linear narratives.
“There’s still a kind of handicap at work. The biggest cultural shift is [in] the number of people who play rather ordinary games,” he says, citing the likes of Candy Crush and Flappy Bird.
“You can imagine an argument that games are widespread enough to justify, for the first time, a broad slate of adaptations of games. But I’m still not sure that’s likely to produce the kind of mainstream success even of the kind [that has come from] comic books, which took 50 years to make it to mass market.
“History seems to show us that it hasn’t been successful doing that. We’ve been trying to do that for decades. Is there reason to believe it’s different now?”
But Activision’s Van Dyk is targeting exactly that kind of breakout hit with the games it chooses to adapt. “We will look for intellectual property that has passionate following, but I think we want to make programming for everybody. That respects and celebrates players of the game, but also makes this content as broadly appealing as it can be.
“If you look at Marvel, they make a Thor movie not just for people who read Thor comics. It needs to be a great film for everyone.”
