Xbox is quietly pitching a $300M Hollywood bundle covering Halo, WoW, Elder Scrolls, and more

Xbox is shopping a package of more than 12 game franchises to Hollywood studios, asking at least $300 million for exclusive film and TV rights across the lot. The bundle includes Halo, World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls, Diablo, and others, according to Puck News. Netflix, Paramount, and Universal are all in talks — but the price has already pushed at least one of them out.

The bundle play

Rather than negotiating individual deals per franchise, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wants a single buyer to take the whole package in one go. It's an unusual structure: one studio would hold exclusive adaptation rights across a vast library of gaming IP for the long term. The $300 million floor struck at least one potential partner as too high, even for franchises of this scale.

The strategy follows a rough stretch for Xbox. The division cut 3,200 jobs — about 20% of its workforce — in July 2026 and posted a 10% revenue decline in Q2. Sharma, who took the top job in February 2026, has since laid out a multi-year plan to close the margin gap with Sony and Nintendo by 2030, with media adaptations as a key lever.

Proof of concept

The pitch isn't coming from nowhere. Fallout on Amazon Prime was a commercial hit that drew millions of new players back to Bethesda's games. The Minecraft movie crossed $1 billion at the global box office. A Call of Duty film based on the Modern Warfare sub-series is already in production at Paramount, scheduled for June 2028.

Halo is the complicated case. Paramount+ cancelled its live-action series after two seasons, and the licensing rights have since reverted to Xbox. That puts Halo back on the table — but studios will remember the show's troubled run before signing anything.

What happens next

No deal has been announced, and the single-buyer model is a hard sell: committing hundreds of millions to an all-or-nothing bundle is a different risk profile from optioning one franchise at a time. If a deal does close, it would likely define what Xbox looks like as an entertainment brand for the rest of the decade — less a console maker, more a franchise licensor.