Remember a few years back during the big gaming boom when Riot Games was talking about trying to become a media empire that transcended gaming? Well, the great tech layoffs of the last few years have put an end to a lot of those aspirations, and apparently we missed out on a League of Legends movie along the way – though maybe that’s for the best.
The revelation that there could’ve been a League of Legends movie comes via a new report on Variety that says Riot actually had to pay to extract the IP from a film deal gone south.
“As early as 2020, sources said the company successfully enlisted Anthony and Joe Russo, sibling producers who architected the ‘Avengers’ franchise at Marvel, to develop a film project set in the ‘Legends’ universe. Then when Riot reconsidered the creative approach it had requested of the Russos, a badly negotiated agreement resulted in Riot having to pay them $5 million to walk away from the project due to a deal point that would have tied the company to a script that was no longer what they wanted.”
For what it’s worth, while the industry has moved on, Riot Games hasn’t entirely let go of the idea; co-founder Marc Merrill insisted to Variety that the company’s “ambitions in entertainment haven’t changed,” even if putting out good stuff takes longer than the company originally hoped – and even if Riot has all but “disbanded” its entertainment division.
And of course, as Variety discusses at length, Riot is about to launch the second and last season of Arcane; the franchise’s 18 episodes cost an estimated $250M to develop and market, “making it far and away the most expensive animated series ever on streaming or linear TV.” It might sting less if Riot Games hadn’t also done major layoffs this year and shut down the Riot Forge program, which seemingly led to the early death of at least one MMORPG.
