New Line, Virtual World cut deal
New Line prexy Michael De Luca said Friday that the two-year development deal will kick off with "Battle Tech," a futuristic sci-fi live-action pic based on one of VWE's popular interactive games.
John Fasano ("Another 48 HRS,""Die Hard 3") is now scripting the adventure. New Line veep Aaron Meyerson is overseeing the production.
"We want to move into more areas of interactive and virtual reality," said De Luca. "We liked the personalities. We just thought this would be a good creative match. We liked their energy. We think we'll see a lot of projects from them."
De Luca said New Line has always wanted to expand in these directions, but made it even more of a priority after the success of "The Lawnmower Man," its film based on a virtual-reality experience.
"We're just kind of educating ourselves as to what is out there," De Luca said.
VWE chairman Tim Disney said the deal would benefit both companies. "We like New Line because they're relatively small and they can move quickly -- so can we ," he said.
VWE claims to be the first company to bring location-based virtual reality technology to the public. With two U.S. locations and two in Japan, VWE has sold more than 510,000 tickets to virtual reality adventures. The company has plans to add at least one new adventure each year.
