Death Stranding's Hideo Kojima really wants to smoosh movies and video games together
Even as one film studio's efforts to co-brand as a video game company basically exploded recently—with the mass-resignation of Annapurna Interactive's entire gaming staff producing multiple major reports this week, detailing how things went wrong at the Stray company—veteran gaming figure Hideo Kojima is still out here trying to push the idea of smooshing video games and movies together. Death Stranding and Metal Gear creator Kojima—whose gift for big promises, bold ideas, and occasional outright self-promotion has made him a rare celebrity in the world of professional game creators—gave an interview with Variety this week, where he talked about his friendship with Jordan Peele, his plans to turn Death Stranding into a movie, and his belief that games and movies are inevitably growing closer together.
Kojima is deliberately vague about what some of those latter ideas mean, focusing his comments largely on production—i.e., the way a move toward digital TV and film production has generated new similarities in the ways content for both mediums are produced—while also noting that "The assets are digital and can be used either way." (That latter while musing that one of his company's current games, mysterious espionage thriller Physint, could be easily adapted into a film; Kojima has never been shy about his own cinematic ambitions, sometimes creating 30-minute-long cutscenes for his Metal Gear Solid games.) Kojima, who worked at Konami for years before going independent amidst production drama on Metal Gear Solid V, also talks about the importance of owning the Death Stranding brand, which tells the story of a post-apocalyptic courier (Norman Reedus) who travels a broken America, ensuring Conan O'Brien has magical psychic wi-fi. (While also guzzling Monster Energy Drink; we cannot emphasize enough that nothing in these last two sentences has been a joke.) Launching that first game, which won a ton of awards and sold fairly well, was critical to plans to eventually take Kojima Productions into the world of TV and film (and, possibly, "there will be many things that are like a hybrid of movies and games.") (We do not know what that means.)
Meanwhile, Kojima, who recently signed with Hollywood agency WME, also talked about becoming friends with Peele, after he did a podcast about Nope, saying that the two of them hopped on a Zoom call and after "just five minutes of chatting, he felt like a childhood friend." The duo are working together on Kojima's new Microsoft-published game OD, about which he said this extremely vague string of words: "This is a game, but it’s a game like no other. I can’t go into too much detail, and it’s also hard to explain, but it’s a bit risky and a new challenge for me within the realm of games." (Also, he doesn't necessarily want Peele, or Guillermo Del Toro, or Nicholas Winding Refn, or George Miller, or any of the other famous directors he's befriended in recent years, to necessarily direct movie adaptations of his games, noting, "It’s not about making a video game out of Nope or having Jordan adapt Death Stranding into a film. It’s about making something new together.")
For all his odder tendencies (and occasional over-promises), Kojima remains one of the bolder voices in gaming; expect to hear even more from him as his ties with Hollywood tighten in coming years.