'Call of Duty' Movies Are Coming

Activision-Blizzard, publisher of World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and other huge video games, today announced that it wants to get into the movies and television business.

The company has formed a new division for this initiative called Activision Blizzard Studios, which will focus on creating movies and television shows based on its games franchises. The project that seems furthest along at the moment is Skylanders Academy, an animated television show based on Activision's hugely successful, kid-friendly Skylanders franchise.

According to GameSpot, actors like Norm McDonald, Justin Long, and Ashley Tisdale are already cast to provide voices for the show.

Activision said that it is also creating a "robust cinematic universe" based on the first-person shooter Call of Duty series, which will get its first movie in 2018 or 2019.

I'm not sure how you make a Call of Duty movie, given that 1) those games are thin on story, 2) most people buy them for the multiplayer modes anyway, and 3) what story is there is largely inspired by other action movies.

The Skylanders project makes more sense. It's a huge franchise aimed at kids, it already has a toy line to go with it, so a Saturday morning cartoon-type show might have a built-in audience.

Technically, there's already one big movie on the way to theaters based on an Activision-owned game, Warcraft, though that project was in development with Legendary Pictures before World of Warcraft developer Blizzard merged with Activision in 2008.

It'll be interesting to see how much of an effort Activision will put into to this, and if it will succeed. Games have a very bad history in Hollywood, starting with the infamous Super Mario Bros movie, and through every cinematic atrocity directed by Uwe Boll.

Keep in mind that Microsoft announced a similar push in 2012 with Xbox Entertainment Studios, only to shut down the whole division only two years later, so it's a risky business. On the other hand, Activision also just bought Candy Crush maker King for $5.9 billion, so it's not like the company is afraid of spending money these days.