Grand Theft Auto Wouldn't Be The Same Without Hollywood
Since its inception, the GTA franchise has gone above and beyond in emulating the elements of filmmaking.
There are very few video games that are both as broadly influential and immensely successful as the Grand Theft Auto series. From pretty much the moment the games arrived on the scene with the original back in 1997, their brand of highly controversial, debauched criminal thrills became a fixation for gamers around the world, and in the process spawned a franchise that now includes five mainline games, as well as multiple non-numbered titles and expansions. In under two decades, the series became one of the most lucrative in gaming history, with the most recent installment, Grand Theft Auto 5, becoming the second-highest selling video game of all-time.
Thirteen years after the release of that last installment, Rockstar Games is finally following up the previous game and the acclaim that surrounded it with Grand Theft Auto 6, a sequel that has easily become one of the most anticipated gaming releases of the 2020s. Officially announced back in 2022 with a first trailer released in 2023 (a full decade after GTA 5’s release), not only is the game a long-awaited one, but it could also be the most expensive game ever made, with rumors estimating a budget of around $1 to $2 billion dollars. At that price point, GTA 6 feels like the gaming equivalent of a major studio blockbuster — but that’s an ethos that has been with the franchise since its inception, as the beloved series has always sought to emulate Hollywood and some iconic films in a loving way.
One of the biggest ways that the Grand Theft Auto games have evoked familiar cinematic storytelling is also the easiest to recognize: voice acting. While the first two games relied on text dialogue and only featured voices as ambient cityscape white noise, GTA 3 brought the franchise into three dimensions and also brought some significant Hollywood talent along with it: Frank Vincent voiced Mafia Don Salvatore Leone, Joe Pantoliano voiced Liberty City pimp Luigi Goterelli, and Kyle McLachlan lent his talents to corrupt construction businessman and multi-billionaire Donald Love. Since then, the amount of movie stars attached to the series has only grown in number: Vice City featured Ray Liotta and Burt Reynolds, and San Andreas added Samuel L. Jackson and Ice-T in significant roles.
It’s also obvious that the games have drawn significant inspiration from iconic films and TV shows, mostly ones in the crime-thriller space. In an official PlayStation magazine from 2001, the developers at Rockstar Games discussed cinematic inspirations such as The Warriors (the eclectic nature of the street gangs), Taxi Driver (the grime and decay of New York City), Scarface (the ascension of the protagonist up through a corrupt criminal enterprise), as well as films from Martin Scorsese like Goodfellas. The games would continue to wear their inspirations on their sleeve in the same way: Vice City combined the complex depiction of criminal morality from Carlito’s Way with the neon-drenched aesthetic of Miami Vice, San Andreas aped the gritty urban storytelling of Boyz in the Hood and Menace 2 Society (among others), and the franchise’s entire DNA owes a great debt to crime epics like Michael Mann’s Heat and The Sopranos.
Essentially any crime epic you can think of has been the basis for a GTA game at some point.
While it's not as easy to point to movies that are as clearly inspired by the games, there are certainly many films that feel like they've taken a page from the long-running virtual saga — Baby Driver’s music-centric heist antics unintentionally evokes the feeling of fleeing from police while blasting GTA’s various in-game radio stations, and it seems like a given, but the early installments of the Fast and the Furious movies feel like they could easily be retconned to take place in Vice City or San Andreas. In the last 20 years there's been a concerted effort across gaming at large to become more and more cinematic, and GTA’s been leading the charge for a while — and it's more than likely that trend will continue when Grand Theft Auto 6 finally arrives.
