Brad Pitt in the Dark Void.

So, its more or less official. Of the multi-million dollar deals that are halfway through and fully realized, this one between  Reliance’s Big Entertainment and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment is now one step closer to realization. Brad Pitt would be now starring in Capcom’s Dark Void Series, the next big franchise to hit the gaming world, now boosted by the personal star power of Pitt and the marketing muscle of Reliance BIG.
Though Capcom is releasing its various versions of the game (Xbox, WINDOWS and PS3 ) by January  2010, there is not much details forthcoming on the actual dates of the project going on the floors and the ‘game’ plan. Though we will keep you updated on them as we keep getting them, this is a welcome development as far as the proverbial “Indo-Hollywood projects” are concerned. Reliance BIG has made a very shrewd move in cornering the niche platforms of Gaming and screen entertainment in one swoop, and with all first movers in any businesses, its advantage BIG as of now.
Reliance Big Entertainment had announced way back  in May 2008 about its plan of involving Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise, George Clooney in joint movie projects with its starting corpus fund of US $ 300 million.
So, things are really happening this time around.
And Brad is playing safe with taking a video game on screen and that too with Capcom as the main partner in content for the movie. As a producer, this would help him on many levels in this very shrewdly thought out move in movie making. Brad Pitt as a producer, though made a handful of films that were raved on and parised by critics for content and form, none of them exactly set the box – office on fire, save for The Departed (2006). Troy,Running with Scissors, Year of the Dog, A Mighty Heart, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford  or the latest The Time Traveler’s Wife never even managed to rise above the crowded marquee marketplace.
The video-game-to-film is a reasonably guaranteed route to box-office owing to the presence of the content online and off-line and hence the reach and the engagement is much more than the conventional story-to-movie route. To put simply, even before the movie hits the theaters, you have a  niche audience ready and waiting. But have they been satisfied with these games-to-movie interpretations?
A quick glance through the majors that include Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, the Mortal Kombat series, the Tomb Raider series and Doom, the only worthwhile project that delivered had to be Tomb Raider. Coincidence?

Maybe Brad intends to take off from beau Angelina left off in Lara Croft :Tomb Raider (though the sequel was a squib), and exploit the maximum from this new business relationship.

After all, Lara Croft : Tomb Raider “beat the opening record for a film featuring a female protagonist ($40.1 million for Charlie’s Angels), and is the most successful video game adaptation to date, grossing $300,000,000 worldwide.” (courtesy Wikipedia.)

Maybe The Mighty Void will make it look like short change with the means and might at their disposal.

It would be a tragedy if it turns the other way, ending up as a dark  and bitter joke, true to its name, a mighty void.

For more on The Mighty Void, the game, click here.

Watch the trailer of  Mighty Void here.