The greatest movies never made: Tony Scott’s Eminem-led ‘Grand Theft Auto’
Over the course of his career, Tony Scott made some of the greatest action movies Hollywood has ever produced. His CV was full of highly commercial, highly successful pictures made with a frenetic, saturated style that was thrilling to behold. From Top Gun to Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State to Beverly Hills Cop II, and Man on Fire to Days of Thunder, Scott was always one of Hollywood’s greatest purveyors of escapism. As with any director working in the industry for nearly three decades, though, he also racked up a list of unrealised projects that are tantalising to think about – not the least of which is his Grand Theft Auto movie, which may be one of the greatest movies never made.
The GTA franchise began in 1997 with the release of its first open-world video game, and over the next two decades, it developed into a cultural phenomenon unlike any other. In 2018, the franchise – comprising seven core games – was named the “most financially successful media title of all time.” It has made a staggering $6billion in revenue, putting it well ahead of all-conquering movie series’ like James Cameron’s Avatar.
Naturally, when Hollywood saw what Rockstar Games was building with GTA, it wanted a piece of that action. At various points over the years, producers from Tinseltown tried to convince the co-founder, head writer, and Vice President of creativity Dan Houser that turning Grand Theft Auto into a movie was the next logical step in the franchise’s evolution. However, Houser was not extremely confident in his company’s IP, and he was never sure Hollywood had much to offer.
In 2024, he told The Ankler, “After a few awkward dates, we’d ask, ‘Why would we do this?'” Invariably, the response would be something like, “Because you get to make a movie,” to which Houser would fire back, “No, what you’ve described is you making a movie and us having no control and taking a huge risk that we’re going to end up paying for with something that belongs to us.”
In times past, Hollywood’s track record with video game movies was – to put it mildly – not good. Indeed, until the likes of Fallout and The Last of Us cracked the code in recent years, many video game nerds and industry observers would have said there’d never been a good video game movie or TV adaptation. Add this to the fact that Rockstar knew GTA was a license to print money without the need to involve Hollywood, and it begins to make perfect sense that there has never been a GTA movie. Houser was adamant, “We had what we considered to be multi-billion-dollar IP, and the economics never made sense. The risk never made sense.”
With the hindsight of GTA being, you know, the most profitable entertainment product ever invented in the history of the world, this decision seems reasonable. However, Houser and his brother Sam, with whom he co-founded Rockstar, were already thinking like this only four years after the first game was released. In late 2001, GTA III was released and became the best-selling video game ever. At that point, Hollywood made one of its first overtures to the game makers. Fascinatingly, this one had talent attached.
In 2022, video game developer Kirk Ewing told the Grandest Game podcast that he was the one who told Sam when this offer came in. Ewing revealed, “I think at that point it was still in Sam’s mind that [a movie] might be something that he wanted to do.” So, when a producer called at 4am with an intriguing proposition, Ewing was all ears. He claims the producer said, “Kirk, we’ve got Eminem to star, and it’s a Tony Scott film. $5 million on the nose. Are you interested?”
Ewing excitedly phoned Sam and told him that the world’s biggest rapper and the director of freakin’ Top Gun wanted to make a GTA movie. He sweetened the deal by reiterating that Hollywood wanted to pay Rockstar $5 million for the privilege, too. To his surprise, though, Sam dismissed the idea with a simple, “Not interested.” Even at that early stage, the bright lights of Hollywood didn’t blind the Housers, and they knew “the media franchise that they had was bigger than any movie that was going on at the time.”
Ultimately, while the GTA story undoubtedly teaches a valuable lesson in believing in your work and not selling out to Hollywood at the first opportunity, as a huge fan of Scott, it’s hard not to consider it a missed opportunity. His propulsive, gritty, extreme style – all quick cuts and whipping cameras – would have surely lent itself to an exciting GTA movie. If that was married to a script that harnessed the best aspects of the game’s storytelling and stunning worldbuilding, it might have been something truly special.
On the other hand, if Rockstar had been distracted by a movie in that period, maybe seminal games like GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas would have turned out differently. And if Scott had made GTA, he likely wouldn’t have had time to give us Man on Fire, which is probably the greatest revenge movie ever made. So, maybe cinephiles lucked out that the Housers had such supreme confidence in their game.
