Who’s ready for an adventure?
Village Roadshow Entertainment Group has acquired the film and television rights to the classic adventure puzzle video game Myst. The production company will mine the deep mythology of the Myst franchise to develop a multiplatform universe across film and television (both scripted and unscripted).
Village Roadshow will develop and produce the projects alongside Myst co-creators and brothers Rand and Ryan Miller, as well as Delve Media’s Isaac Testerman and Yale Rice. Village Roadshow will take on a “full-scale approach” to developing Myst content, utilizing its entire creative team to adapt the properties across film and TV.
Myst was first released in 1993 by Cyan Productions, the video game development company co-founded by the Miller brothers in 1987. The first game sold over 6 million copies, making it the top-selling PC release for years until The Sims unseated it in 2002. Over the years, the franchise has grown to include nearly 10 individual titles which have cumulatively sold more than 15 million copies. There has also been a number of novels based on the game published by Hyperion.
The franchise features a deep canon spanning thousands of years of mythology and history, though the primary saga follows Atrus, the grandson of a woman named Anna who sets off a momentous series of events when she discovers a mysterious civilization, the D’ni, in a cavern deep beneath the New Mexico desert. The D’ni possess a unique ability to pen books that connect distant worlds, which serves as the catalyst for the Myst games and novels.
The move to adapt Myst comes shortly after a new mandate by Village Roadshow, following the appointment of CEO Steve Mosko in October, to make the company into a “broad-spectrum content creator” focused on television, streaming and other distribution platforms to complement its development of feature films, such as the Joaquin Phoenix-led Joker, which is set to be released Oct. 4 by Warner Bros.
Streamers, networks and cablers alike are all looking for major franchises to turn into multiple series/film universes in a bid to help cut through the clutter and draw subscribers. Recent deals include Magic: The Gathering and The Chronicles of Narnia, with Netflix landing deals for both.
