Microsoft is quietly shopping the biggest pile of unadapted IP in entertainment.
Per Matt Belloni’s What I’m Hearing newsletter at Puck, the Xbox division has started pitching Hollywood on a package of more than a dozen games — Halo, World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, and Diablo among them — that would all go to one studio or streamer under a single long-term deal.
Belloni reports that at least Netflix, Paramount, and Universal are taking a look, and all three declined to comment.
One source tells Belloni that Microsoft wants more than $300 million, a figure at least one of the interested parties has already balked at, per the report. Microsoft declined to comment as well.
The pitch itself is simple. Instead of studios negotiating rights game by game — the way Amazon landed Fallout or Netflix landed Gears of War — one buyer writes one big check and gets the whole slate to turn into movies and shows for years.
And the slate covers everything Microsoft owns: Halo from Xbox’s own studios, Elder Scrolls from the Bethesda purchase, World of Warcraft and Diablo from Activision Blizzard. All three arms of the empire, one price tag.
The Fire Sale Follows The Bloodbath
Why Microsoft is selling now is not a mystery. Xbox cut 3,200 jobs in July — about 20 percent of the division — and dumped four studios in new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s first big move.
Bloomberg’s reporting this summer filled in the rest of the picture: Game Pass has shrunk to around 30 million subscribers against internal projections of 77 million by 2026, and putting Call of Duty on the service day one reportedly cost Microsoft about $300 million in lost game sales in a single year.
The package Microsoft is now shopping to Hollywood carries the same price tag as one year of the Game Pass mistake.
Microsoft spent the Phil Spencer era buying its way to this library — $7.5 billion for Bethesda in 2021, $68.7 billion for Activision Blizzard in 2023 — which, as Belloni notes, made Xbox the largest video game publisher outside of China.
The plan was to pour all of it into a Netflix-style subscription. That plan is dead, and now the actual Netflix is being offered the library instead.
What’s Already Spoken For — And What Isn’t
Part of the library is already working in Hollywood, and working well.
A Minecraft Movie made nearly $1 billion worldwide for Warner Bros. and Legendary, with a sequel dated for July 2027.
Fallout is a hit at Amazon, with a third season already ordered.
Paramount has the Call of Duty movie, and Netflix has a Gears of War film plus a Minecraft animated series in development. Per production listings CBN covered this month, Far Cry, Gears of War, and Call of Duty are all gearing up to shoot in the UK at the same time.
Paramount is also the studio that already tried Halo — two seasons on Paramount+ before cancellation — and Belloni confirms those rights have reverted to Xbox, meaning Microsoft gets to shop its flagship fresh.
The unadapted stack is the actual sales pitch.
Elder Scrolls has never been touched. Diablo has never been touched. The Warcraft universe has been to theaters exactly once — 2016’s Warcraft, which did about $440 million worldwide, with barely $47 million of it domestic, and China carrying the load. That movie came from Universal, meaning one of the three companies now kicking the tires has already made a Warcraft movie.
Netflix And Paramount, Meet Again
For readers following the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger fight, the buyer list should look familiar.
Netflix and Paramount just spent months fighting over Warner Bros. Discovery, and now both are looking at the same Microsoft package.
If Paramount lands it, David Ellison’s studio would hold Call of Duty, the Halo history, and — if the Warner deal closes after the trial next March — the Minecraft movie pipeline on top of it.
Netflix, meanwhile, has spent the year planting flags in gaming: Gears of War, the Minecraft series, and the GTA 6 Extended Look premiere that crashed the service on August 27.
A $300 million check for a dozen-plus franchises with built-in audiences would make Netflix the default home of gaming’s biggest names overnight.
Here’s the thing: the price is not the crazy part. Game adaptations are the one bet Hollywood cannot currently miss on.
Minecraft returned nearly a billion dollars on IP the industry spent a decade calling unfilmable, Fallout minted a franchise for Amazon in one season, and Mario did $1.3 billion before either of them.
Against those numbers, $300 million for Halo, Diablo, Elder Scrolls, and Warcraft in one basket reads like a bargain.
What’s giving buyers pause is the seller. Microsoft has changed its gaming strategy three times in three years — day-one Game Pass, then not; console-first, then not; and now landlord of its own franchises.
Somebody will still write the check, because the IP is that good. And Microsoft gets to tell investors the $80 billion shopping spree is finally paying out, $300 million at a time.
