Though Team Bondi flew like a phoenix before bursting into flames, former studio head Brendan McNamara is already working on his next project. The title, Whore of the Orient, was revealed in a Financial Review interview with filmmaker George Miller, who scooped up the rights to McNamara’s idea for his production company. Miller’s Kennedy Miller Mitchell Interactive, a studio comprised of former Krome Studios and Team Bondi staffers, will be working on the game after it completes Miller’s planned Mad Max game.
“With the government’s support we can immediately go forward with two games,” said Kennedy Miller Mitchell partner Doug Mitchell. “Warner Bros is standing by, willing to do Fury Road; the incentive would bring it back here in a New York minute. It’s not immediately obvious but the potential in the video games sector is massive. Just from the statistics people are showing me, it’s a $60 billion industry fast-tracking towards $90 billion. And it’s not dominated by any particular country.”
Bright lights, big city. Shanghai could be the next location for McNamara's new game.
“Films are very expensive, so studios are making drastically fewer of them, but much higher quality, and they invest in sequels, because they know that they’ve got an opening which they don’t have to buy with their marketing dollars as aggressively,” he continued. “So, instead, people are drifting to game acquisition because of the budgets. The cost of a film may be $170 million – twice that to market it – whereas the basic cost of making a game might be 10 per cent of that. Look at LA Noire, they sold about 3 million units in a week, about $US135 million ($130 million) net revenue, off a cost base which was infinitely lower than even your average low-budget film.”
In fact, Miller finds that techniques used to make games can actually help make movies better.
“There are technologies they have to develop in games because things need to happen more quickly in a game,” Miller said. “Those are going to speed up digital filmmaking and television way more, because they’re obliged to do it if they want things to look as real as possible and happen in real time. And that’s really pushing things – so that instead of years to make an animation film, that time could collapse.”
“Whore of the Orient” is another name for the city of Shanghai, China. Are we looking at ‘Shanghai Noire’ from McNamara and company?
