Apologies for the skeptical headline. I've been covering this story in various forms for a decade now.
Village Roadshow Entertainment Group, the Australian-American co-producer and co-financier of the “Matrix” and “Sherlock Holmes” franchises, has acquired the rights to the first-person graphic adventure. [...]Village Roadshow says it will use the games to develop a “multi-platform universe including film, scripted and unscripted television content.” The company will develop and produce the content with original co-creator Rand Miller and his youngest brother Ryan Miller, as well as Isaac Testerman and Yale Rice at Delve Media.
For the past few years, Cyan has been partnering with Legendary Television to try to make a Myst TV series or movie or something. (E.g. the failed Hulu deal in 2014.) It sounds like Legendary is no longer involved. So this news could be summed up as "Cyan switches production partners". But Village Roadshow has put down money for the rights, so that's a step forward.
(I need hardly remind people that "paid for the rights" is a long, long way from "greenlighted the production of a show." And "multi-platform universe" basically means "we haven't decided what we want yet".)
The article mentions Isaac Testerman's Delve Media. This is interesting. The last time I saw Delve mentioned in relation to this story was this backroom wrangle in 2012. I didn't realize they were still involved, or had become involved again.
Anyhow, despite my world-weary tone, this is exciting. Hopefully we'll hear more about it in August at Mysterium.
Update: Robyn Miller confirms (via tweet to The Verge) that Legendary's involvement with the project has ended. Ryan Warzecha said the same (in a discord chat).
ReplyDelete> Hi Sean. Myst project with Legendary is dead. I’m not involved with this. Our youngest brother @rsjmiller is writing first draft of screenplay.
>
> https://twitter.com/tinselman/status/1144003996446670848