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The making of Grand Theft Hamlet, the GTA Online Shakespeare production, crashes into theaters in 2025

Originally posted on Video Games on SI
By Josh Broadwell | Last updated Dec 20, 2024 12:12 PM ET

Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary covering how the GTA Online Shakespeare experience came to be, is coming to U.S. theaters in 2025. The theatrical release follows Grand Theft Hamlet’s showing at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival and its win for Innovation Award at the 2022 Stage Awards, a British institution that recognizes excellence in performance theatre.

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Director Pinny Grylls and actor Sam Crane created the in-game show in 2020 as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The couple watched their son playing GTA Online, Crane got a friend to join him in the game, and they started planning an in-game theatrical production just for fun. That concept grew, until they decided to stage Hamlet in GTA Online – a decision that came with far more hardships than they initially expected.

You can probably guess some of them, if you’ve played GTA Online. Griefers, environment issues, griefers, finding the right venue, griefers. The documentary trailer shows several instances where other players mobbed the production company, chased them down in helicopters, fired explosives at them – y’know, the usual things. However, the biggest problem facing Crane and Grylls was whether anyone would care enough to audition and then to watch the production.

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Grand Theft Hamlet – the documentary – explores all of this and follows the production from its conception to opening night, as it were. It’s as much about the story of creating a Shakespeare play in GTA as it is a tale of how people craved community and something they could be part of during the pandemic.

If you’re in the U.S. and fancy seeing it for yourself, you can catch it in movie theaters starting Jan. 17, 2025.

This article first appeared on Video Games on SI and was syndicated with permission.

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