union-entertainment posts

On Saturday we and other web sites reported that the movie rights to the long-in-development zombie action game Dead Island had already been bought by movie producer Sean Daniel and Union Entertainment back in 2009. The first reports came from movie industry web sites which usually are accurate.

Now our sister site Joystiq reports that according to a statement from Klemens Kundratitz, the CEO of Koch Media (the parent company of Dead Island publisher Deep Silver) those movie right haven't been bought at all. While it admits that it has received "a vast amount of inquiries" about securing those rights, Kundratitz states, "We want to do it the right way as film realizations of games (or vice versa) usually fail to deliver what the fans were looking for." That's certainly true. Our question: How did all these movie industry web sites miss the mark so badly on their original stories?

Dead Island made a big splash this week with its reintroduction, thanks in no small part to the release of the very cool, even moving, CGI cut scene that showed a family being attacked by zombies in reverse. Now comes word that the movie rights to Dead Island have already been secured.

The Wrap reports that movie producer Sean Daniel (a producer on the Mummy series of films, among others) and Union Entertainment actually bought the Dead Island movie rights from the game's developer Techland rights way back in 2009. (Dead Island was first announced in 2007). The story says that Daniel and Union are now moving quickly to get a script written for the adaptation. Union also has the movie rights to Techland's Call of Juarez shooter series.