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Hollywood Now Wants to Make a 'Dead Island' Zombie Movie, Too

by Alex Billington
February 18, 2011
Source: The Wrap, Deadline

Well that didn't take long. Yesterday morning we featured a highly-buzzed-about trailer for the upcoming video game Dead Island, as it's a heartbreaking and beautiful teaser trailer for an otherwise savage and bloody-looking video game. As you probably expected, Hollywood got wind and the rights to a movie have already been snatched up. The Wrap and Deadline report that Hollywood is now buzzing about making a movie based on the game. Producer Sean Daniel and Union Entertainment already bought the rights last year and now given the viral success of that trailer, they're potentially sitting on a big Hollywood goldmine.

Sean Daniel (of The Mummy series, Dark Blue, The Wolfman), along with Richard Liebowitz and producer Dmitri Johnson, have been tracking the game's development for several years and acquired the rights early. But thanks to the success of that trailer, "studios and agencies are all over them, suggesting talent packages and story lines to try and make a screen deal" that will likely come together in the next week. The film is supposedly going to follow a Memento-like storyline even though the game doesn't, according to Deadline, and Union is currently working on the screenplay as well. The video game is about a family on vacation at an island paradise when a contagious zombie outbreak hits. They're cut off from the rest of the world and have to protect the other survivors and somehow escape without any guns, only the weapons found around there.

Dead Island was developed by Techland and will be released for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC later this year. If you haven't seen the trailer - watch it here! Any chance this movie might turn out good?

Update: Not so fast! Deep Silver, publisher of Dead Island, has released an official statement claiming "neither the film rights nor any other licenses have yet been sold by Deep Silver." So someone thinks they've got the rights when they really don't. But Deep Silver is aware of the buzz and still want to sell it. "[We are] currently looking through a vast amount of inquiries." They also speak, importantly, about the quality. "We want to do it the right way as film realizations of games (or vice versa) usually fail to deliver what the fans were looking for. We will not go down this route with Dead Island," says Klemens Kundratitz, CEO of Koch Media. "We would therefore be honored to work with someone who already has a proven track record with blockbuster movies." I think that might've been a bit of a jab at Mr. Daniel & Mr. Johnson above. Ouch!

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