Producer Fred Malmberg on Awakening the Animation for ‘Mutant Year Zero’

In July, Heroic Signatures announced that the company is in production on its first animated feature film for its popular franchise, Mutant Year Zero. Based on the tabletop game of the same named and subsequent tactical adventure video game Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (2018), the film follows an unlikely team of anthropomorphic animal-mutants as they navigate a post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of answers. Dolph Lundgren (Expend4bles, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom) and Ian McElhinney (The Outlaws, Game of Thrones) will lend their voices to the feature, with more talent to be announced soon. The movie is being produced using Unreal Engine 5 in an innovative approach to video game IP adaptation.

We had a chance to catch up with Fred Malmberg, President of Heroic Signatures and the film’s producer, to find out more about this exciting feature:

Animation Magazine: So, congrats on the great news about your new film. Can you tell us a bit about the status of your new animated movie?

Fred Malmberg: Thank you. So we’re in production on the movie, and we’ve added some great new voice talent to the mix which we will share with the press in the near future. We aim to be finished with the movie in time Annecy in June next year.

Can you take us back to the origins of Mutant Year Zero?

It actually goes way back, when I saw what happened at Machinima. Half of my career is in video games and the other half is in linear media, publishing, merchandising and the whole IP development side. I always thought there was something great about what they developed at Machinima, except that a lot of the animation looked just like trailers, not like real animated movies. But when we started to use Unreal Engine and I met with [director/producer] HaZ [Hasraf] Dulull (The Beyond), it became clear to me that he was the perfect person to direct a movie. He came from the video game world, and he had directed live-action films but was also a VFX supervisor and had supervised video game development, so he understood the toolbox very well. He felt very comfortable with using Unreal, had worked with the Epic guys before and really knew a had a lot of insights about where and how to use the technology.

My co-producer Mark Wheeler and I started talking about this in 2019, about taking the assets and environments from an existing game and making a movie or series similar to Love, Death + Robots. The challenge, of course, is that the cost of developing all that art. If you are to use the Unreal technology, you have to be able to reuse assets. We had this game called Mutant Year Zero, which was a cult classic RPG game that my company published about 40 years ago. We though this game would be perfect to develop as a movie. What we needed to do was create a proof of concept or a sizzle reel. We released that four years ago, and then we set up the financing package. We were the development process by 2021. We began writing the screenplay and had the director attached. We needed to get into the toolbox and see what we had in terms of the environment and determine the story we wanted to tell. About a year ago, we went into pre-production and full production this past February.

Can you tell us the budget?

We don’t disclose our film’s budget, I can tell you that the way we can do this is the way we can repurpose exciting assets as much as we can. That’s the key. In the video game world, we spend millions of dollars on art. That’s the key to the success: You need to have a 360 vision, because the minute you start making the new art assets of high quality, the budget just sky rockets, and then, what’s the point in using the Unreal 5 engine? It’s a very powerful tool, but we said from the beginning that we can’t spend $30 million like we’re making The Mandalorian!

Where is the bulk of the production being done?

It’s being done in Northern Island, in Belfast. We actually set up a studio there and built a team around our director HaZ and Paula Crickard. The idea is course is that we can scale up production as we go along with other IP as well. The studio is called Rot Mist. It’s 95 percent Unreal, and five percent other tools.

What do you love about this project?

I think that the beauty of linear media is we can really sink our teeth into the characters. We had these great characters from the game, and we really wanted to expand their world. There was so much more to tell. So it’s not the classic approach of, “let’s take a video game and license it to someone else and make a movie about it.” This is really telling the story of these characters. To me, it’s a very personal story, because the game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world with anthropomorphic animals: It’s kind of a fable. I created that tabletop game many years ago and it was really for middle graders. It was this warm IP that has always been very close to my hear, so I’m super happy that we can see it come to life yeah.

What is your take on the new era of quality films and TV shows based on games?

I believe that the convergence has been here for a long time, so I don’t think it’s new, but what’s new is that you have filmmakers and producers and financiers that come from the gaming world. In the past, it used to be very separate worlds where there was a huge divider between the film industry and the video game industry. Today, you have filmmakers that are gamers, and that makes a huge difference because the story must be working for linear programming. Otherwise there’s no point in it.

What are the biggest challenges for you and your team as you’re bringing this game into the feature world?

We had to just throw ourselves into this project. If you’re coming from the classic film and TV or even animation world, a lot of people didn’t really know how to approach gaming IP. But something happened in the last year or so, but all of a sudden, people are all on board. Two years ago, it was really difficult to explain what you could do and not do in Unreal. When they build all these beautiful sets pieces, you still can’t use it for gaming because they will only build the facade that you see. Whereas in games, we have to be fully 3D and take that camera and move around. It’s a different approach to animation. The Unreal 5 engine has kind of democratized the process, and you don’t have to be Pixar to be able to do this.

What is your take on the use of AI in animation?

I am not a big fan, although I think we can use it to save a lot of time in the visualization and concept phase and even in certain animatic phases. You could use it for internal use, but I believe this is an artistic medium and we have to protect the creative community as much as we can. We can use AI and train things on it, but it usually comes from someone else’s work. I mean the door has been opened, and it will really change things a lot in the industry. I think we have to embrace it somehow, but we also have to know the pitfalls. We have to be aware that this is a it is talent-driven technology. Again, it’s a relatively new field, so I’m being cautiously optimistic. I think there are more benefits to AI than downsides.

How would you describe the visuals of Mutant Year Zero?

I think obviously Love, Death + Robots is a huge inspiration. I would say the warmth and storytelling skills of the Pixar movies are also formidable. But our movie is a classic buddy movie, just like the old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies. Its roots also go back to the graphic novels of the ’70s and ’80s. I can also name Asterix and Obelix comic books and Scooby-Doo cartoons as inspirations.

What were some of the big animation films and TV shows that left a big impression on you when you were growing up in Sweden?

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, the TV landscape was very regulated in Sweden. American animation was considered very commercial and was very regulated. Every year, we got one big classic Disney movie released in theaters, like The Jungle Book or The Aristocats. We would also get some Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Scooby-Doo. But we did get a lot of Eastern European stop-motion shorts. I remember the Professor Balthazar animated series [by Zagreb Films]. In hindsight, I know that I always preferred the American animated shows like Tom and Jerry, because they were a lot of fun. But I do think that some of my overall taste was formed because we were force fed all these quality, serious stop-motion animation that was produced outside the Hollywood system, as well.

Based on the IP by Heroic Signatures, Mutant Year Zero is being produced by Pathfinder Media in Los Angeles and director Hasraf Dulull’s HaZ Film in the U.K.