That Dead Island trailer – supposedly created by the Glasgow-based animation studio Axis Animation1 – has already been viewed far over 3 million times on Youtube, with an equal amount of tweets to go. Its popularity has, in turn, turned up quite a fair bit of misinformation that now surrounds the project. As things stand, a clarification to our earlier report is in order: Unlike previously reported, no movie deal for the game has yet to be made.
In speaking to LA Times’ 24 Frames, Koch Media representative Malte Wagener stated that
There are a lot of different stories out there but the bottom line is that neither Union nor Sean Daniel has ever talked to Koch Media. Richard [Leibowitz, of Union] and [game developer] Techland agree there was never any rights.2
I personally find it more than a little troubling that so many respectable film websites would report the deal as fact, which in turn leads me to question Koch Media and Deep Silver’s role in the propagation of the news. While I don’t think this sort of misinformation bodes well for the negotiations of a potential adaptation of the game, it’s frankly quite futile to discuss any of this as both the film and the game are still but a ghost in the hype machine. At the time of writing, Dead Island is coming out late 2011.
Share