Id's Deal

THG: From what I understand, id had a clause in the deal that if a Doom movie didn't get made right away, the rights would revert back to you.

Todd Hollenshead: Yeah, I think that was critical for ultimately getting the deal moving forward. When we signed the original deal with Warners, we basically said you have twelve months to greenlight the movie. You have to have a script by this date, you basically have to have all these things in place under a progress to completion schedule, for them to really get moving on it. What we gave up in exchange was that we took no money at all in the deal. When I explained that to John Carmack, he looked at me crossways. I told him, "Look, I think this is the best way for us to actually try to get a movie made," because ultimately that's what the goal of the process is, not just to get a fee for licensing the rights. We'd been down that road before, and I wanted to try something different that would maybe shake up the process a bit, and break whatever inertial resistance we had to start getting the process moving.

THG: How much input did id have in the film?

Todd Hollenshead: I think the Hollywood term for what we had is "meaningful consultation along a lot of the process." You can have a lot of stuff in the contract, but it comes down to what people you're dealing with, and whether they really want your input in or not. My experience was that (producers) John Wells and Lorenzo diBonaventura actually solicited our input and wanted us to be involved, and I think we had a positive impact on the final outcome. I think we have a good mutual respect for each other. The fact is that we're a video game company and we don't perceive ourselves as moviemakers, nor do we really want to be moviemakers.

When you talk to the broad-based entertainment media, they're like, "Oh you must really be proud because you've hit it big time now that your game's been turned into a movie." I kind of giggle about that a little bit, because we'll probably make ten to twenty times as much on the video game sales as we'll make from the movie, where they sort of see it as finally finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Really, it's another opportunity to hopefully broaden the appeal of the brand, but from a pure dollars and cents standpoint, it's something that's totally non-core to the business. It's gravy on top certainly, but it's not something we're going to live or die by.