Activision Blizzard launches film and TV studio

For those who don’t know, Nick van Dyk was formerly a vice president of business development and strategy at The Walt Disney Company and a chief strategy officer at Artisan Entertainment. Titled Activision Blizzard Studios, the production company will create media based on their already massively popular franchises. 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.

The newly formed Activision Blizzard Studios will base the shows and movies on the company’s games.

“Activision Blizzard Studios has the unique advantage of starting with a library of world-class intellectual property that includes a few of the largest franchises which have not yet been developed in film and television.” .

ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) – Video game maker Activision Blizzard Inc.is moving into the film and TV business.

Apart from the above mentioned series, Activision studios also have an upcoming project which will be a cinematic adoption of the famous Call of Duty franchise. From what we’ve seen in the past when movies based on games have never gone well. The game franchise has a history of pulling in film and TV actors for voice and motion capture work, most notably with Kevin Spacey in last year’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Activision hopes to build on the broad appeal of its games by turning them into franchises that could also lead to consumer product sales, and sustain the life of its hits. Activision Blizzard also announced plans to acquire King Digital Entertainment, creators of the ubiquitous Candy Crush mobile game, just a few days ago.

Activision’s highly anticipated “Call of Duty: Black Ops III” game went on sale earlier on Friday.

And in late October it hired former ESPN CEO Steve Bornstein and Major League Gaming co-founder Mike Sepso to run a new esports division, focusing on competitive gaming. From what we’ve seen of these films so far, such as with the Warcraft teaser trailer, it seems like the days of bad video game movie adaptations are behind us.

So, if you’re a fan of these series then this should pretty exciting news for you.