Eminem was Nearly in a Grand Theft Auto Movie

In an alternative universe, we could have had a GTA movie with Eminem as an actor and Top Gun’s Tony Scott as a director.

News by LCLupus on  Nov 16, 2022

Gaming news can sometimes be a little strange, and this one is no exception. It appears, according to Kirk Ewing, that DMA Design, the company that would later become Rockstar, once had a few tentative plans to make a Grand Theft Auto movie in the early 2000s, a movie that would have starred Eminem as an actor and had Tony Scott, the director of Top Gun, attached as the director.


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Ewing, an agent and friend of some developers over at DMA Design back in the day, discussed this on Buggy Malone’s Grandest Game, a GTA-oriented podcast, and revealed some of these startling behind-the-scenes details. He was in a meeting with Sam Hauser, the big producer over at Rockstar, and the two of them discussed the possibility of a GTA movie. Later, Ewing received a call from a producer to make said Grand Theft Auto movie. They even wanted to hand over a cool $5mil to Rockstar as an added bonus.

This was, allegedly, shortly after the release of Grand Theft Auto 3, the game that would skyrocket Rockstar into gaming infamy and staying power. However, Houser decided to turn it down upon receiving this offer because, according to Ewing: “They withdrew from any conversation about making a film when they realized the media franchise they had was bigger than any movie that was going on at the time."

Grand Theft Auto was simply too big at the time, and a movie would have probably caused a good number of problems. This likely wasn’t helped by the fact that in those early days, film adaptations of video games tended to be rather bad. It was the height of Uwe Boll’s genius streak of video game adaptations that are, as everyone agrees, universally loved as adaptations.

So, a Grand Theft Auto movie never happened, but judging by Eminem’s performance in Eight Mile, he probably could have pulled off a decent performance in an adaptation of video gaming’s premier crime series.

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed

L.C. Lupus

Subscriber, NoobFeed

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