Hideo Kojima's Dream of Breaking into Hollywood Is Nearly a Reality

Love or leave them, Hideo Kojima's games have a unique directorial flair that is the creator's signature. Over the years, many have accused the auteur of wanting to direct movies, with how extensive some cutscenes became. Kojima makes no secret of his love for film, and now that he's signed with talent agency WME, it seems the auteur is headed for Hollywood sooner rather than later.

That's according to a new interview out of Variety, with Kojima sitting down with the outlet ahead of his appearance on the Toky Game Show main stage. Blaming his lack of work in Hollywood on his Konami contract, Kojima said: "I made games at Konami for 30 years. Though I was offered a lot of work outside of the company to film commercials or films or write scripts, I couldn’t do any of them because I was employed at Konami, and I was a board member as well. Also, the games that I made were not my IP; they belonged to the company. At the end of 2015, I went independent. Because I love movies, I could have gone on to shoot movies or commercials. But for the first phase, I thought about the video game fans all across the world who were waiting for my next new game, so I decided to create a video game first."

That game was Death Stranding, and a sequel is currently in development at Kojima Productions. The developer is working on "O.D." with Microsoft and Jordan Peele, and the espionage game Physint is still just an early concept. But it's the subsequent two phases, which Kojima will seemingly explore with WME, that will allow him to pursue his other dreams:

"What comes next are different forms of media: movies, anime, TV dramas, etc—basically, expanding the game IP to other media. That’s the second phase. That’s what we’re aiming for next. I created Kojima Productions under the scope of “digital entertainment,” but I don’t think it necessarily has to be a video game. We could create a new IP from a game, an anime, a film, or something totally different. Anything is possible, and that’s the third phase.