Speaking on Bugzy Malone’s Grandest Game podcast, Kirk Ewing, the co-founder of the virtual avatar app Veemee has claimed that Rockstar Games once turned down a GTA movie starring Eminem.
Ewing claims that a late-night conversation with Sam Houser nearly led to the movie being greenlit.
During the podcast, Ewing said “Because of the relationship that I had with Rockstar and I had with Sam, I actually tracked him down to his hotel room one night where I knew he was going to be staying for a while, and the two of us stayed up late and talked about the possibility of making a film.
“This was just after Grand Theft Auto 3. And I think at that point, it was still in Sam’s mind that it might be something that he wanted to do”, Ewing said.
He continued: “I remember taking a call at about 4am from one of the producers in LA with an offer to make a film, and he said – Kirk, we’ve got Eminem to star and it’s a Tony Scott film, five million on the nose, are you interested?’”
“And I phoned up Sam and said: Look, you need to listen to this. They want Eminem in the Grand Theft Auto movie and Tony Scott to direct. And he said not interested.”
“At that point, they withdrew from any conversation about making a film, when they realized that the media franchise that they had was bigger than any movie that was going on at the time.”
Grand Theft Auto 3 was released in 2001 and became the best-selling video game of the year. It’s unclear when the alleged conversation happened, but Grant Theft auto 3 went on to sell over 2 million units by February 2002, making Rockstar’s thoughts on the series’ popularity warranted.
Around the same time, Eminem released the box office hit 8 Mile which achieved $242.9 million at the box office.
Would you have liked to see a GTA movie starring Eminem?
For more GTA news, check out Take-Two’s official comments on the development of Grand Theft Auto 6 from this year’s Rockstar hack.
