The Man Who Licensed Tomb Raider (January 27)

John Gaudiosi interviews the exec that turned Lara Croft into a movie star and a box office smash.

While president of Eidos Interactive in 1997, Keith Boesky was the executive who talked Hollywood into turning Lara Croft into a movie star. Boesky, who currently runs his own Hollywood shop (Boesky and Company) that specializes in the migration of intellectual property to and from the video game business, also served as the head of Hollywood agency International Creative Management's video game department. While at ICM, Boesky sold Ubisoft's Prince of Persia to Jerry Bruckheimer (that film is currently in production at Disney). Boesky also represented Peter Jackson at ICM in the King Kong video game deal.

Boesky's well known both in the Hollywood community and in gaming circles, thanks to his frank opinions that result in truthful, and often heated debates at the various roundtables he participates in around the world. He's been a busy man recently, getting deals for clients like Clive Barker, who's working on several new video game projects, as well as the Ludlum Estate, which last year signed a deal with Vivendi Universal Games to bring Robert Ludlum's best-selling books to video game consoles. Fans of The Bourne Identity will one day soon see a virtual Jason Bourne starring in his own game franchise. Boesky also works with directors Robert Rodriguez and John Milius, and writers like Randall Jahnson (The Mask of Zorro).

With a new Tomb Raider movie rumored to be in the works (Angelina Jolie had originally signed on to star in three Paramount Pictures movies) and a new Eidos game heading to consoles, Boesky talked about the journey that Lara Croft made from game screen to multiplex -- a journey that has paved the way for the 40-plus video game-based movie projects that are in the works today.

"In 1996, Hollywood had no interest in video games after debacles like Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter: The Movie," said Boesky. "No one wanted to talk about action movies with a strong female lead." Boesky was against the idea of turning Tomb Raider into a movie, but followed through on his boss' orders.

With Hollywood turning a deaf ear to his first video game pitch, Boesky orchestrated a marketing effort that turned Lara Croft into a household brand. Lara Croft was the only video game character featured on the video wall for U2's international Zoo TV tour. Douglas Coupland wrote Lara's Book: Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider Phenomenon. Toy Biz released a Lara Croft action figure. And the slew of licensing deals lead to a cover story in Time Magazine. The final touch was buying ads in the Hollywood trades (Variety and The Hollywood Reporter) that featured the number $475,000,000 above a picture of Lara Croft.

"When we returned to Hollywood in 1997, the movie studios looked at Lara Croft as a property that could appeal to female teens in the wake of Titanic, which was carried by 14-year-old girls," said Boesky, who said every Hollywood studio was interested.

Paramount Pictures inked a deal in December 1997. When the reported $80 million movie opened on June 15, 2001, Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft raked in over $47 million during its opening weekend and grossed nearly $275 million worldwide over its theatrical run. Boesky said that people looked at the success of Tomb Raider and thought it was because of the video game, and the result was a flood of video game rights being snatched up by Hollywood producers. Boesky referred to this as Hollywood's "herd mentality."

Regarding the current trend of Hollywood's infatuation of video games as fodder for films, Boesky isn't a fan of taking a game property and "watering it down" to appeal to the mainstream theater-goer.

"I don't think the Tomb Raider movie was the best thing for the property," said Boesky, who doesn't believe there's ever a single reason, creatively or financially, to turn any game into a film. "The release of the Tomb Raider game and the film could have been better coordinated. It's Eidos' job to make a game fit with the film release schedule because the film is the larger investment."

Boesky said one option that Eidos had, if a new game could not be released, was to create a compilation of Tomb Raider games with Angelina Jolie on the box art and add some bonus levels. He said because a large percentage of fans of the first film were female, this could have helped grow the game's audience beyond the male gamer.

While the second Tomb Raider movie, which cost a reported $95 million and grossed over $156 million worldwide, wasn't as big a hit as the original, Boesky doesn't believe it slowed down the video game-to-movie business as much as the recent Doom did. He says one of the reasons Doom, which cost a reported $70 million and grossed only $54 million worldwide, didn't work is because it had a "fixed production date."

When Eidos' attorney Leigh Brecheen wrote the contract for Tomb Raider, Boesky included a "progress to progression" clause, which meant that if Paramount stopped working on the movie for a set number of days, the film rights reverted back to Eidos. This guaranteed that the film would be made. Boesky said the problem with the "fixed production date" is that it rushes a film to the big screen, even if the script isn't ready. That's one of the many reasons Warner Bros. Pictures dropped the Doom movie, which Universal then picked up and released with a "fixed production date."

Boesky said the upcoming Halo movie has a similar "fixed production date" clause. He believes one of the reasons Microsoft, Universal Pictures, and 20th Century Fox brought in Peter Jackson as the producer of the Halo movie was to ensure there's not a repeat of Doom. "I can't imagine Peter Jackson making a bad Halo movie," said Boesky, who said he'll go see the flick when it opens.

Microsoft went outside of the traditional Hollywood model of game licensing by hiring Alex Garland to write the Halo screenplay and then brought in producer Peter Schlessel to shop the film rights. The game giant reportedly demanded $10 million plus 15 percent of the gross in its deal-making (although the final amount was closer to $5 million up front), in addition to a $75 million "below the line" budget for the sci-fi film.

Boesky said that once Universal and Fox have invested money into the film, he doesn't believe they'll answer to Bungie when it comes to creative decisions on the picture.

"Should Universal and Fox want to go in one unique direction with the Halo movie, will Bungie stand up to them and say we don't want to do the movie if it's not our way?" asked Boesky.

Boesky expects to see more games heading to the big screen, as some producers choose their properties by looking at the game's box art, while others covet the built-in global audience, or the story and characters of the game.

Source: Yahoo Video Games, By John Gaudiosi 27 Jan 2006