“Hollywood, there’s so much bullshit,” Hazelight founder Josef Fares told Eurogamer earlier this year. “I think 90 percent of the meetings are actually bullshit, and ten percent are what actually happens.”
The outspoken creator of co-op hit Split Fiction was responding to a question about the film adaptation of his 2021 game, It Takes Two. The deal to turn it into a movie was announced several years ago, but since then we’ve heard nothing—and even Fares says he’s in the dark about the status of the It Takes Two film adaptation. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
That might explain why Fares doesn’t sound so optimistic about another movie adaptation of one of his games. This time it’s Split Fiction, which was the subject of a bidding war for the film rights a few weeks ago. But just because a game is tagged to become a movie doesn’t mean it will ever happen.
“You know what I say? I believe it when I see it, because nothing has happened yet,” Fares said during a chat with Variety this week, adding “it would be nice if it happened, but again, I’ll believe it when I see it. Sometimes there’s a lot of talks, but nothing happens. So we will see.”
Deals to turn games into movies seem to happen on a near-daily basis these days: Sony is making a Helldivers 2 movie, a second reboot of Resident Evil is in the works just four years after the first reboot, Magic: The Gathering is getting a live-action film treatment, and even Vampire: Survivors has both an animated series and a live-action movie in the works, despite developer Poncle admitting “the game has no plot.”
But just because a deal is struck doesn’t mean the film version is a guarantee. Donnie Yen tried to make a Sleeping Dogs movie for years before throwing in the towel, though now Simu Liu is shooting his shot. A Just Cause movie was announced in 2011, and only just recently got a new writer and director attached to it. Like Tom Hardy’s Splinter Cell movie, also from 2011, sometimes these things simply don’t happen.
Hopefully, both It Takes Two and Split Fiction won’t share the same fate. “I think [Split Fiction] could become a really cool movie,” Fares said, “if you write it the right way.”
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