Few trailers in any entertainment medium have gripped the Internet the way the trailer for the zombie video game Dead Island did last week. So feverish was the reaction that a number of stories claimed that a set of Hollywood producers had bought film rights that the game's publisher, which controls those rights, said they never bought.

We caught up with Malte Wagener, the Munich-based head of global business development for said publisher -- Koch Media and its Deep Silver label -- to find out exactly what was happening on the movie front. Will Dead Island, which comes out as a game later this year, become a film, and what shape will it take if it does? Read on...
 
24 Frames: The Internet was abuzz this past weekend that that you had sold Dead Island film rights to 'Mummy' producer Sean Daniel and the financier Union Entertainment. Did you?

Malte Wagener: There are a lot of different stories out there but the bottom line is that neither Union nor Sean Daniel has ever talked to Koch Media. Richard [Leibowitz, of Union] and [game developer] Techland agree there was never any rights. There was some misrepresentation on Techland's part about what rights they have and what they can organize, but Richard confirmed in an e-mail that these were just talks and he doesn't have the rights. [Leibowitz declined comment.] To be honest, I'm surprised that someone of Richard's caliber would even go out there and say this, if he did say it.

So where does that leave a Dead Island movie?

MW:  We've had a lot of inquiries, not only from Union but from other major players for film adaptation. The talks are very early and there's no deal whatsoever. Right now I'd say it boils down to three or four opportunities. Some are studios, not just bonders [financiers] like Union. We'd rather go with a big studio that can bring the creative side.

Do you have firm studio offers, and what do they look like?

MW: We had a couple of big-name directors come to us. One of the top directors in Hollywood sent a studio his link to the trailer and said he was interested in this, and the studio contacted us. There are different opinions of course in how to do this. The first is that you find a producer and then he brings in a creative team. The other is to find a director first and he'll bring people along. My feeling is we should find a director first.

Would casting be a key component of a Dead Island film?

When we wrote this week that someone in Hollywood should drop what they're doing and develop "Dead Island" as a feature little did we -- or anyone else -- realize that someone was already doing that.

The Wrap reported today that "The Mummy" producer Sean Daniel is part of a group that acquired rights to the as-yet-unreleased video game  back in 2009.

The trailer is, by almost every online account, among the best in years of any medium (a rare case of nearly everyone on the Interwebs actually agreeing). So there's a lot of hope that the aesthetic on display in the trailer could be turned into a great film. (You can watch the trailer again here.)

Daniel is, incidentally, a producer of some pedigree. Although he's known mostly as a commercial genre producer (he does, unfortunately, count the flop that is "The Wolf Man" as a credit) he also showed a different side with seminal slacker film "Dazed and Confused."

But to capitalize on the strengths of the trailer, he and his Union Entertainment partners will need to bring in not just writers and directors capable of telling a good zombie story, but creators with a soulful sensibility, which is what makes the trailer so heart-shatteringly great in the first place.

An even bigger question is whether this small gem can be made better when it's made bigger.  As strong as the "Dead Island" trailer is, it's a zombie mood piece. That works in three minutes, but will lose its impact in 100 minutes. Making "Dead Island" work as a movie will require extrapolating from a series of fight scenes full-bodied characters and story lines -- without losing what made some of those fight scenes special in the first place.

And then there's the biggest question of all:  Once you do make a "Dead Island" movie, how do you possibly cut a trailer for it?

--Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

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Photo: 'Dead Island.' Credit: Deep Silver.