Chernin Entertainment just bought the rights to make movies and TV shows out of Arc Raiders and The Finals, which means the company behind last year’s Backrooms movie is now in the video game adaptation business. The deal covers both franchises from Embark Studios, with Chernin serving as lead producer. That’s right, the extraction shooter about scavenging robot parts and the game show shooter where you can turn into a tiny statue are both getting the prestige television treatment.
Chernin Bets Big On Shooters
Chernin beat out several other studios for these rights, which tells you something about how desperate Hollywood is for the next “The Last of Us.” The production company’s film president, David Ready, said these games have visually stunning atmospheric worlds that contain countless stories to tell, which is exactly what you say when you haven’t figured out what the actual story is yet. I’ve played Arc Raiders for about sixty hours, and the most dramatic thing that happened was a guy named xX_ScavL0rd_Xx teabagging my corpse after I fell off a cliff trying to escape a Leaper. That’s not a story. That’s a Tuesday.
Soderlund Promises Transmedia Something
Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund called this the next big step in growing both games into deeply integrated transmedia experiences that reward the passion of the global player community. I need to know who writes these quotes. Is there a guy whose entire job is translating the phrase we would like more money into corporate speak? Because he’s good. Too good. Deeply integrated transmedia experiences could mean anything from a prestige limited series to a mobile puzzle game where you match colored gems to unlock lore about the Arc machines.
What Even Is The Finals Story
The Finals is a free-to-play first-person shooter where contestants compete in a virtual game show for fame and money. It has accumulated over 30 million registrations in three years. The game has no real narrative. You shoot people; you may win; you do it again. The closest thing to character development is when your teammate disconnects mid-match, and you have to decide whether to stay or eat the penalty.
A movie adaptation would essentially require someone to invent an entire plot from scratch, which sounds terrifying. Also liberating. If I were writing it I would make it a satire of reality TV and just cast actual streamers. Let xQc play the final boss.
Arc Raiders Actually Has Lore
Arc Raiders is set on a future Earth ravaged by mechanized threats called Arc, and you play as a Raider scavenging a vibrant atmospheric world while contending with deadly machines and rival Raiders. This one at least has something resembling a premise.
The game sold over 16 million copies since launching in October 2025 and won best multiplayer game at multiple award shows. It was the most successful release in Nexon’s history. That’s a lot of people who will have opinions about the casting choices.
Player Counts Are A Thing
Arc Raiders player numbers have declined somewhat since the initial explosion. Steam figures sit around 40,000 concurrent these days, though the game still sold an additional 800,000 copies in a recent quarter. The Finals sits somewhere around 8,000 to 13,000 concurrent on Steam depending on the day.
These aren’t dead games by any means, but they’re also not Fortnite. The adaptation announcement will probably spike interest for a few weeks. Maybe Chernin can time the release to coincide with a new season drop. That’s the kind of synergy these transmedia experiences are for, right?
My Tangent About The Backrooms Guy
Chernin produced this year’s “Backrooms “movie, which made a lot of money from what I understand was essentially a feature-length YouTube video about liminal spaces. That’s not a knock. That’s actually impressive. But it does tell me something about how they think. They see potential in concepts that don’t have traditional stories.
Arc Raiders and The Finals are both multiplayer games where the actual narrative happens in your head when you’re crouched behind cover, and your teammate is screaming that he sees a squad. Turning that into scripted content is a fundamentally different challenge than adapting a game with cutscenes and dialogue trees. I hope they understand that. I hope they don’t just make a generic sci-fi movie and slap the logo on it.
Nobody Knows Anything Yet
No plot details. No release dates. No confirmation of which franchise gets a film versus a television series. Just a press release and some quotes about rewarding player passion. The creative teams at Embark will work closely with Chernin to ensure the games’ creativity extends into new formats. That’s reassuring, I guess. I’ll believe it when I see a trailer. Until then, I’m going to assume the Arc Raiders adaptation is a buddy comedy about two Raiders who keep arguing over who gets the rare loot drop. Somebody write that down.
Arc Raiders Gets The Final Word
Look. I love these games. Arc Raiders in particular has eaten a truly embarrassing number of my evenings. But video game adaptations are a minefield. For every The Last of Us there are five Borderlands. The fact that Chernin won a bidding war means they’re hungry.
Hungry is good. Hungry also means they might be desperate to justify the money. The only thing I know for certain is that somewhere a writer is currently staring at a blank page, trying to figure out how to make a game show shooter into prestige television. Good luck to them. I mean that sincerely.
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