Activision Launches Studio For Call Of Duty Film Adaption
Is Activision a big spender this week or what? They just threw down 5.9 billion dollars to buy phone game maker King, and now they’ve announced the formation of an entire movie studio. While most game companies license their characters to established production companies to get their properties on the big screen, that’s not how Activision rolls. They’re going to attempt to do it in-house.
Activision Blizzard Studios is the name of the new venture, and their first project will be a TV cartoon adaption of their Skylanders property. Eric Rogers (formerly of Futurama and, um, Brickleberry) will take the job of showrunner, and the series will boast a C-list cast of Justin Long, Ashley Tisdale, Jonathan Banks and Norm MacDonald. In case you’re wondering, Spyro the Dragon WILL be in it — he’s who Long is voicing. MacDonald is playing a dirty-minded lazy degenerate pigeon–wait, wrong show, I mean Glumshanks. Skylanders Academy will be the title, and it’ll probably show up during daytime hours on one of the children’s cable networks.
Activision’s new studio has movie plans as well, and they involve Call of Duty. Current plans are vaguer than the ones for Skylanders, but they want their first Call of Duty feature film to roll out in either 2018 or 2019 and launch a series of sequels. All of this madness will be helmed by co-president Nick Van Dyk, formerly of the Walt Disney Company.
If you’re wondering where World of Warcraft fits into all this, it was licensed out before these plans were ever made. Legendary Pictures will be releasing a Warcraft movie next June.