Video Game Stray to be Adapted as an Animated Movie
After the success of last year’s Nimona, Annapurna Animation is growing, taking on several projects, one of which, according to Entertainment Weekly, is an adaptation of last year’s video game Stray. Stray is a sci-fi adventure game where you play as a cat navigating a futuristic urban landscape. It was a big seller, got good reviews, and received some awards, so an adaptation makes sense. It’s also an in-house effort, as Annapurna’s video game division, Annapurna Interactive, developed Stray with Blue Twelve Studio. Annapurna has been behind some great movies over the last decade or so, including American Hustle, Zero Dark Thirty, and Her. (They also produced Terminator Genisys, but they can’t all be winners.) Nimona was their first foray into feature film animation. There’s no time frame on the Stray movie yet, but Andrew Millstein, the co-head of Annapurna Animation with Robert Baird, had this to say about their approach to the film:
“This is a game that’s all about what makes us human, and there are no humans in it… It’s a buddy comedy about a cat and a robot, and there’s such a hilarious dynamic. So, there’s comedy inherent in this, but there’s not one human being in this movie. I think it’s one of the reasons why the game was incredibly popular, that you are seeing the world through the point of view of an adorable cat. How did they pull that off, and how are we going to pull that off in the movie? We will, even though sometimes it feels impossible, but we know that’s the essence of the game and the key to telling the story.”
Video game movies are far from the joke they once were, huh? It used to be a given that they would be awful, with many saying video games simply weren’t adaptable as films. That was always nonsense, of course; you can make a good movie out of anything if you have the right people involved. Lately, the paradigm has shifted considerably, first with Sonic the Hedgehog and, most significantly, with The Super Mario Bros. Movie. An untapped market has revealed itself, and with comic book adaptations on the financial wane, Hollywood needs the next big thing. It’s also telling that Annapurna is sticking with animation for Stray. The cat obviously has to be animated, but they’re not going the Sonic route and putting him in a live-action setting; it’s going to be animated from head to toe. I’m sure that’s for the best, and animation may be one of the keys to making video game adaptations work. The Super Mario Bros. Movie wouldn’t have been nearly as good in live-action, and the same is probably true of most video games, especially the ones with fantastical settings and characters. Stray will be an interesting one to watch as it makes its way to the screen.
