Activision launching movie and tv studio

Games
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Activision Blizzard Studios’ first production will be “Skylanders™ Academy,” an animated TV series based on the award-winning Skylanders® game. Currently in production under the supervision of showrunner Eric Rogers (“Futurama”), “Skylanders™ Academy” will feature the voices of Justin Long (“Alvin and the Chipmunks,” “Ask Me Anything”) as Spyro, Ashley Tisdale (“Phineas and Ferb,” “High School Musical”) as Stealth Elf, Jonathan Banks (“Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul”) as Eruptor and Norm Macdonald (“Saturday Night Live”) as Glumshanks. Additional voice talent includes Harland Williams and Richard Horvitz. The award-winning, $3 billion Skylanders® franchise has sold through more than 250 million toys since pioneering the toys-to-life category in 2011.

Another near-term initiative for Activision Blizzard Studios will be the development of a robust cinematic universe based on the Call of Duty franchise. Call of Duty®: Advanced Warfare remains the number one-selling title on next-generation consolesii and today marks the launch of the highly-anticipated new Call of Duty®: Black Ops III. Activision Blizzard Studios envisions a series of Call of Duty feature films as well as the possibility of television adaptations.

Lights! Camera! DLC!

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What could possibly go wrong?

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$6b on King, WoW bleeding subscribers, and now a movie studio? This could end poorly.

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Did Activision just go full retard? I thought you weren’t ever supposed to do that.

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Worked for Microsoft!

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Haven’t they had a pretty large division solely focused on cutscene development since the Warcraft days?

From that angle this doesn’t seem that bizarre.

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Having a team do work on cutscenes and having a full branch focused on the exploitation of franchises, i.e. development of movie and tv show concepts with corresponding storylines, production of said concepts, marketing, distribution or sale of the results isn’t really the same thing.

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I think they are overestimating the quality if their game writing…

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I’m going to break ranks and guess that this is going to be wildly successful.

Given the staggering success of Marvel based movies etc, I think this is a no brainer. It’s also the only real way they can feasible grow their business going forward. They have pretty much reached the ceiling as far as gaming goes. I also think it’s a smart move to diversify your revenue, while still staying in a very familiar territory. They have years and years of experience to draw on, producing some of the best animation that’s been made.

When you have billions with a b kind of money, really the only place you can go is into the movie business if you want to keep doing things that are entertainment related. I’m actually surprised it took them this long.

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I was kind of hoping they’d get into politics.