Arc Raiders and The Finals have been chugging along nicely for Embark Studios since their respective releases, building considerable and consistent audiences in the online shooter space. Now, it seems the games will be seeking new audiences, as both have been picked up by North Road Company’s Chernin Entertainment for movie adaptation and TV syndication.
According to reports from Variety, a number of studios were also competing for the rights alongside Chernin, which will now serve as lead producer for future adaptations based on the games. At this early stage, it’s unclear what sort of adaptations the studio will be looking to produce, or whether these will hit major theaters or streaming platforms.
Still, it’s easy to see where the appeal in taking the format of the games to new mediums comes from. The post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting of Arc Raiders lends itself to the boom in sci-fi media like Dune finding success at the box office, while the extraction gameplay lends itself to emergent storytelling which, alongside the game’s worldbuilding, can snowball into its own original story. The Finals already presents itself as a dystopian VR TV show in which people fight for victory for the entertainment of others, which arguably lends itself to an action movie formula pretty easily.
Considering the success of both games, too—Arc Raiders recently surpassed 16 million sales—there’s also a built-in audience who would turn up, which helps them stand out amid an increasing number of games getting the movie and TV adaptation treatment. Already this year, Resident Evil has topped the box office, Iron Lung proved its success on a smaller scale, and the Mario sequel followed in the incredibly high-grossing footsteps of its predecessor. Gaming adaptations are a big thing in Hollywood right now, and with games like these which have developed large and consistent audiences, the choice to adapt them feels obvious. We’ll just have to see what direction these films or TV series take by the time they’re finally produced and released.
