A portion of a GameDaily interview with Hollywood producer Adrian Askarieh...

GD: Why do you think so many video game films, Max Payne and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li being the most recent, have failed at the box office?

AA: Well, here's the thing. Hitman made $100 million worldwide and we've done about $81 million on DVD. People seem to really like the movie and we still feel like we can do better with Hitman 2. I think the notion is that first and foremost, you want to make a good movie. I think you can't worry about the fact that it's based on a video game. If you start worrying about the fact that it's based on a video game, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have to treat it as you would a novel or a comic book, or any other source material. If it has all the elements and characters and ideas of a good movie, those are the components you concentrate on and you sort of flesh that out in the screenplay and you make a good movie out of that idea. I think that's been our goal. We're doing it with Kane & Lynch.

GD: When it comes to Hitman 2, Tim Olyphant is working on a new TV show, so are you going to get a new Hitman in terms of the actor?

AA: We haven't discussed that. We and the studio are all waiting for the script to come in to make some very big decisions, but we'd love to have Tim if he wants to do the movie. We'd love to have him back.

GD: Because he has to shave his head for this role, that impacts things that he does after you wrap Hitman 2, correct?

AA: I agree. That's a big factor for him because he's got a TV show, and it's just a matter of the timing. We'd love to have him back if he wants to do it, but we haven't gotten to that point. We'll probably do Hitman sometime middle of next year, but right now we're just waiting for the script to come in.

GD: Can you explain what happened with Spy Hunter, which you'd been working on for so long and with so many people – The Rock, John Woo, Paul W.S. Anderson...

AA: Spy Hunter was my baby. I worked on it for six years and it was the most heartbreaking experience I've gone through in the business. Everybody who has had any kind of success in the film business has a story like that, and I think it's almost a rite of passage. I worked on it for six years, it didn't come to fruition at Universal, the option collapsed, Midway was incredibly generous to us, and Warner Brothers bought Midway and they're going to do the movie. I wish them the best of luck and I'm going to go see it in the movie theater.