ARC Raiders and The Finals land film and TV adaptations
Chernin Entertainment will lead the film and TV projects based on Embark Studios' ARC Raiders and The Finals, after beating several studios to the rights.
Both of Embark Studios' shooters are heading to film and television. Chernin Entertainment, the film and TV division of The North Road Company, has been set as the lead producer on adaptations of ARC Raiders and The Finals, winning the rights after a contest that involved several production companies and studios.
What has been announced
Variety reported the deal on 5 October. Chernin will lead on both the television series and the films, with Nexon-owned Embark Studios, the developer of both games, attached to the projects. Patrick Soderlund, Nexon's executive chairman and Embark's founder and chief executive, described the agreement as the next big step in growing both titles into "deeply integrated transmedia experiences". David Ready, president of film at Chernin Entertainment, called them "ambitious global IP with the potential to become major franchises across film and television".
Two very different shooters
ARC Raiders is the easier sell on paper. The extraction shooter launched in October 2025 and has sold more than 16 million copies, taking best multiplayer at both The Game Awards 2025 and the 2026 BAFTA Games Awards. The Finals arrived in December 2023 as a free-to-play team shooter built around a televised game show, and has drawn more than 30 million players in three years. One is a tense, quiet, high-stakes scavenging game; the other is loud, fast and deliberately theatrical.
Why Chernin got the nod
Chernin Entertainment's recent slate leans on genre work with modest budgets and outsized returns. The film Backrooms grossed more than $400 million worldwide against a reported $10 million budget, and the company also produced the Apple TV series Chief of War. Game adaptations have become a growth market again, with the recent Resident Evil film opening as the highest-rated video game movie adaptation on record, and both of Embark's titles arrive with large, active audiences already in place. Neither project has a writer, director, cast or release window attached yet.
Our opinion
The Finals is the one to watch, because its premise is already televisual: contestants, an arena, a host and a scoreboard. Strip out the shooting and the show-within-a-show structure does half the adaptation work for free, which is more than most game-to-screen projects can say. ARC Raiders is the harder problem. An extraction shooter's appeal lives in tension, risk and the long quiet before a firefight, and that is exactly the register that film and television keep flattening into gunplay. Chernin taking both on at once is a rational bet on a shared audience, but it also puts two very different adaptation problems in one producer's in-tray. With Embark attached as developer rather than showrunner, the creative question stays genuinely open: whose story is this, and does anyone on the writing side actually play the games?