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If there's a television canon, then "Avatar: The Last Airbender" is definitely in it. Since its debut on Nickelodeon in 2005, the animated fantasy show has remained beloved by its oldest fans and won the hearts of countless new ones. Personally, "Avatar: The Last Airbender" has one of my favorite character ensembles in all of TV. Its leads were young enough for the target audience to relate to, yet complex enough for adults to be just as rewarded watching them.

Take Zuko (Dante Basco), the scarred prince of the Fire Nation who goes from villain to hero. Best redemption arc ever? It's up there. But standing next to Zuko as one of the show's most complex characters is his sister, Princess Azula. While her brother was always torn between good and evil, Azula relishes the latter. She seems like the "perfect" Princess: powerful, ruthless, and favored by her father Fire Lord...

Ever since its launch, Grand Theft Auto Online has been a massive home for a variety of players, whether it's friends looking to embark on crazy missions, or individuals looking to create the most chaos and damage possible. Uniquely, Grand Theft Hamlet seeks to break the series' violence-driven formula to create a more engaging and innovative format for what the Rockstar game could be, though it is slightly hampered by the lack of longevity in its premise.

Grand Theft Hamlet is a 2024 film where two unemployed friends attempt to stage Shakespeare's Hamlet within the virtual realm of Grand Theft Auto. The movie unfolds as a humorous and surreal narrative, blending classic literature with the chaotic world of the video game.

Runtime  89 MinutesGenres  DocumentaryCast  Gareth Turkington, Mark Oosterveen, Jen Cohn, Sam CraneDirector  Pinny Grylls, Sam CraneWriters  Sam Crane Pinny Grylls

Directed by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, Grand Theft Hamlet focuses...

There are, at a minimum, and I checked, 18 bazillion adaptations of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” It’s one of the most beloved and scrutinized texts in the whole of the English language.

More actors than anyone can count — strike that, I guess there’ve been 18 bazillion — have put their stamp on this 425-year-old play about a prince and his revenge against his conspiring, murderous uncle. The words “to be or not to be” are emblazoned within the global lexicon, preserving forever Shakespeare’s complex thoughts about ending one’s own life, as generation after generation of performers and directors put their own stamp on perhaps the most well-worn dramatic material humanity has.

But I’ve never seen a “to be or not to be” speech quite like the one in “Grand Theft Hamlet.” It is now a speech about life spoken to lifeless automatons, frequently interrupted by real-life jerks who murder the actor mid-speech.

A pivotal moment in Hamlet revolves around an in-universe play, where a nested performance is part of a ploy to speak to a higher reality. Grand Theft Hamlet sees the power of this play-within-a-play and asks, “Why not a play-within-gameplay?” The result of two stage actor pals’ mid-pandemic cabin fever,...

If one thing is certain about uncertain times, it’s that people will still try to create art. And it was in the midst of the boredom and artistic desperation induced by Covid-19 lockdown that Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls, and Mark Oosterveen came up with the idea to stage a production of Hamlet inside the virtual cityscape of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto Online.

GTA Online is something of a perfect conduit for what Crane and company attempt to create. After all, the subtext of Grand Theft Auto V’s single-player campaign is the idea of men trying to divine meaning from what they do and what still needs doing. That campaign also represents another level down of Rockstar’s meta-creative reckoning with the monsters they’ve unleashed. That side of GTA 5 has since been utterly eclipsed by its lawless online counterpart, which made an already popular game into...

Most movies based on video games have a long and spotty track record that runs the gamut from the terrible (2024’s Borderlands) to the slightly less terrible (2022’s Uncharted). However, movies that take place within a video game as it’s being played by actual players is a genre that, at the moment, consists primarily of 2024’s Knit’s Island and The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. To that short list we can add co-directors Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s documentary, Grand Theft Hamlet, a hilarious and even touching Covid-era chronicle that follows two unemployed British actors coping with the loneliness and creative boredom of lockdown by mounting a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet within the world of Grand Theft Auto Online.

The film whittles down 300 hours of GTA Online gameplay to a tight 91 minutes where Crane and fellow unemployed thespian Mark Oosterveen walk, run, drive, fly, punch, and shoot their...

Mubi, the art house film streaming service, is adding to its weird and wonderful library of movies with, what could be, one of the best video game movies (literally) ever made. The last few years have seen video game adaptations boom in popularity. The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has dominated in cinemas with each new entry, and shows like The Last of Us and Fallout were major successes. But, what if, instead of making a movie about a video game, someone made a movie inside a video game? Introducing... Grand Theft Hamlet.

Directed by Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane, Grand Theft Hamlet is a comedy documentary about two out of work actors attempting to stage a rendition of William Shakespeare's Hamlet in the beloved Rockstar Studios game. In 2021, the UK was in its third lockdown during the Covid pandemic, and Grylls and Crane, two out of work actors, were...

The 2024 SXSW Film Festival kicked off March 8 in Austin with the opening-night world premiere screening of Doug Liman’s Road House remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Conor McGregor. It started nine days of debuts including for movies starring Rooney Mara, Isabelle Huppert, Gael García Bernal, Kristen Stewart and more. The Anne Hathaway romantic dramedy The Idea of You from SXSW stalwart Michael Showalter closed the fest on Saturday.

Keep checking back below as Deadline reviews the best and buzziest movies of the festival. Click on the titles to read the full reviews.

3 Body Problem ‘3 Body Problem’

Section: TV Premiere

Director: Derek Tsang

Cast: Jovan Adepo, John Bradley, Rosalind Chao, Liam Cunningham, Eiza González, Jess Hong, Marlo Kelly, Alex Sharp, Sea Shimooka, Zine Tseng, Saamer Usmani, Benedict Wong, Jonathan Pryce

Deadline’s takeaway: 3 Body Problem’s biggest existential threats are just how redundant it all seems, and how every...

For the most recent precedent for Grand Theft Hamlet, you’d probably have to go back nearly 20 years, to a 2006 episode of South Park. Titled “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” it found Cartman marshaling his friends to take on a super-advanced rogue player with a posse of killer crabs who has taken to killing everyone in his path in the Tolkienesque greenfields of Azeroth. This virtual psychopath sends shivers down the spines of the programmers at WoW’s corporate HQ.

After Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’ documentary debuted earlier this week at SXSW, however, it is only a matter of time before directors see the multitude of possibilities to be mined from the gaming world, not least because the technical advances made in recent years mean that even the most basic console games can blow up to fill a cinema-size screen quite comfortably.