Courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter

After years of awkward advances, the Hollywood community and video game makers finally seem to have arrived at the initial stage of what promises to be a meaningful, integrated and fruitful collaboration. Talent is moving freely among the media of film, television and games, in part to extend existing movie and TV franchises but also drawn toward original intellectual property created for the game space.

That point was underscored in June during the inaugural Hollywood & Games Summit, presented by the Game Developers Conference and The Hollywood Reporter. On the heels of that successful event, The Reporter decided to continue the discussion, inviting category movers in the game realm to our offices to take part in a debate led by The Hollywood Reporter publisher Tony Uphoff. Joining us were Activision Publishing executive vp Robin Kaminsky; Multiverse Network co-founder Corey Bridges, whose startup firm seeks to lower the cost of entry in the massively multiplayer online space; UTA digital-media agent Brent Weinstein; and Electronic Arts Los Angeles vp and general manager Neil Young.

The Hollywood Reporter: A few years ago, we were all talking about the promised land, how video gaming and film marketing were going to come together in some magical, mystical way and derive huge revenue and synergy. Where are we on that?
Neil Young: I think we're making good progress. Honestly, I think we're beginning to kind of graduate and mature from exclusively leveraging film properties as marketing vehicles for our products and riding the coattails to getting closer collaborations and partnerships -- starting at the asset end, where we're able to use assets from the films and the games, and ultimately moving through to the talent end, where we're starting to collaborate with the people who make great film entertainment and bring together what they know about storytelling and what we know about gaming to try and create some new, exciting things. At the end of the day, it's all about creating hip products and things that can be both commercially successful and critically acclaimed so that we can turn those into ongoing businesses -- and I feel like we're making good progress.
Robin Kaminsky: I would agree -- I think we're making great progress -- and asset creation is getting better with the new hardware and our ability to share assets. I know that, for example, in our partnership with DreamWorks, there is an extensive amount of asset-sharing. We're getting closer in the collaboration and development process to the point where we now have offices up at DreamWorks' campus in Glendale, where our developers, creative leads and animators spend a lot of time. Gamers have a really interesting job to do when it comes to film because the goal is to create a game where the consumer can play the characters and live in the film world, but a game is far longer than a film, and we have to create a world where they can be in the film and beyond the film. But it still has to be true to the core characters and the core brand -- that's what the film studio and the creative talent at the film studio has a vision for.

I think about a property like "Spider-Man" that lives in comic books and on television, in film and in games -- and in all of those worlds is an incredible success. All of those worlds work together to bring the consumers from one to the other to extend the experience, and everybody from directors to writers to producers, as well as the licensing people, are now engaged in the process and the role that the game plays in that process.

THR: Neil, wasn't that part of why your company went back and acquired literary rights to "The Lord of the Rings"?
Young: Those rights were kind of bifurcated, and that creates limitations past the release of the films. That was certainly the case in "The Lord of the Rings." I think -- to build on your point, Robin -- you've got intellectual property at the center, and then there are many different ways the intellectual property can be expressed. Certainly at EA, one of the motivations is to try to move closer to that center, so we can create more intellectual property, express it expertly in our medium and then find mechanisms with people in other mediums to express it in different places. It's a pretty interesting time right now.

THR: When you think about the game business as it relates to film -- and something like "Spider-Man" is a great example -- there are three ways people express the vaunted nature of synergy: One is that it can sell more to current customers because of the power of the brand; the second is that it can generate new customers for a new platform, so there are game customers who may not read a comic book or maybe just aren't into going to the movies; and the third is some level of cost efficiency. Has that changed?
Kaminsky: Originally, in the industry, the expectation was that the game would ride the coattails of the film. I think now, there's much greater understanding and appreciation for the fact that these two things can work together. Then, when you deal with a property like "Spider-Man" and you've got comics as well, all three mediums are bringing different consumers in and engaging them -- the brand lives in multiple experiences. The assumption was that it was always about the film, and the film plays a very big role -- big films tend to sell a lot of games -- but you need great games to go with it. And great games can bring people back to the films, and you can bring new audiences in who may not be engaged as much in television or comic books from a youth standpoint, who may actually know something like "Spider-Man" first from a game and then come to other mediums. So I think the synergy is far greater than it has ever been before. It becomes about the brand and the experience.
Bridges: I think we're on the verge of seeing, in the realm of synergy, a new type that hadn't really been discussed before. Yeah, a game can be a promotional vehicle; it can be an additional revenue stream based on existing IP. What we're seeing in the massively multiplayer online game space and virtual-world space is a much deeper thing going on, where you have community built up -- you have a culture built up among the people who are fans of a certain property or playing a certain game. It's not like, "Oh, I get to relive this moment in a movie or this moment in Spider-Man's origin!" It's more like, we all get to participate in creating something new, something different, something that's going in a completely different place than one storyteller could have imposed through the tyranny of narrative. And I know video games are not about the tyranny of narrative -- at worst, you're on rails; at best, you've got freeform -- but I think the new, really interesting medium is this virtual-world space where a developer comes in, sets up the world, maybe you'll have a great storyteller set up the back story for it, and then it becomes interactive fiction -- a new work of art. The words don't exist yet to classify this thing, but it takes on a life of its own. It becomes not just another revenue steam -- though "World of Warcraft" is making $1 billion a year in recurring revenue, so that gets anybody's attention -- but you get this much-different phenomenon where there is this culture that has built up among the community of people in a virtual world, and it becomes a much more deep, personal, long-lasting thing -- and I would argue significant.

THR: Brent, as an agent, you have a unique point of view on this as the guy who potentially brings these deals together.
Brent Weinstein: I've definitely seen an increase in the synergies, and the synergy in my world is talent and assets crossing over. I think everything that the other panelists have said absolutely holds true: I'm seeing a lot more people from our traditional world -- that being Hollywood -- move into games. A lot more writers, a lot more directors, and the gaming community is much more open to professional actors. I'm also seeing people from games transition back to Hollywood -- really talented artists, designers and creators taking their skills and applying them to another world -- not necessarily because one is better than the other but because creative people like new challenges. That's why a million-dollar screenwriter will work for substantially less -- (laughs) hopefully not too much less -- to work in games because it's a different expression, and the rules are different. Writers and directors are used to working in parameters that haven't changed much since the beginning of the film industry -- films are supposed to be just so long and contain so many characters and so many plot points -- and in games, there's such a larger canvas with which to paint that it becomes really exciting for them. Those are the things that have really helped this move more quickly.
Bridges: Synergy is great, and there's more to synergy than just the property and what can be done with different lines into the property. What I have found, which is very rewarding, in my discussions and my company's discussions with folks in Hollywood -- studios, agencies and ultratalented filmmakers -- is that they don't necessarily just want to have one IP at the center of a whole bunch of different revenue streams. They're interested in exploring the new medium of games -- in my case, virtual worlds -- with original properties, but with the best talent in the world in this area. The synergy is there on a more thematic thing, like, "I'm a storyteller, and here is a new medium where I can apply my skills." Regardless of what the subject matter specifically is, we've got top talent that's really interested in exploring this new medium.