Players of Portal have known for years that the game would make a great movie. One of this year’s breakout directors completely agrees. Released in 2007, Portal sends players through a series of complicated puzzles by an AI called GLaDOS. The temperamental, emphasis on the mental, AI taunted players as they worked their way through a massive set of experiments using a gun that can create linked portals. There was also the promise of cake. By combining dark comedy, a sci-fi hook and simple game mechanics, the experience became incredibly influential almost immediately. The promise of a film is a different story. The game’s publisher, Valve, is notoriously protective of its IP, including the PC staple Half-Life. A movie adaptation of Portal was previously announced, with little to show for it over a decade later. It’s possible Valve was just waiting for the perfect director to come along. Or at least finish high school.
Kane Parsons, the 21-year-old director of The Backrooms, was just two years old when Portal debuted, but growing up with the franchise clearly influenced the filmmaker. The wunderkind recently shared a pic as he toured Valve‘s Bellevue, Washington, office. During the press tour for his film, Parsons repeatedly called out Portal and specifically its sequel as being the foundational influence for everything he’s made. Considering Backrooms‘ massive abandoned interiors, an unseen organization conducting experiments, and bleak imagery broken up by absurd humor, it’s hard not to see the game’s influence on the creator. Though the pic Parsons shared is just a shot of Valve’s office, it is coming from a director that made an entire movie using nothing but empty offices and vibes. This isn’t an announcement, but it is the most tangible movement around a Portal adaptation in years.
‘The Backrooms’ director Kane Parsons is posting from Valve's office again
He recently expressed interest in making a ‘Portal’ film pic.twitter.com/TXhmgtAWmm
In 2013, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell and filmmaker J.J. Abrams joined each other on stage at the annual D.I.C.E. Summit for a conversation on narrative across games and film. They used that conversation as a pretext to announce that they would be working together to develop projects, with Bad Robot bringing game ideas to Valve and Newell letting Abrams take a crack at Portal and Half-Life. The interaction made the development seem like two mutual fans who wanted to work together rather than a standard Hollywood option. Since that announcement, Abrams was enlisted to relaunch Star Wars for Disney, and then, like Emperor Palpatine, somehow returned to direct Rise of Skywalker. In the intervening years, Abrams gave positive updates about Portal, saying it remained in development. At one point he said there was a completed script, but nothing ever entered production. The Half-Life project fell by the wayside, and Bad Robot recently downsized its headcount with a move to New York. If Kane Parsons is negotiating to take over the portal gun, it’s unlikely to involve Bad Robot.
The backrooms director is not the first filmmaker to go from internet auteur to hollywood stardom on the back of Portal-inspired shorts. Before directing studio features, Predator Badlands director Dan Trachtenberg was best known as a media personality through various Youtube shows and podcasts, including The Totally Rad Show with co-hosts Alex Albrecht and Jeff Cannata. In 2011, he released the live-action fan short Portal: No Escape. The seven-minute movie followed a captive woman discovering a portal gun and attempting to escape her confinement. The short was an immediate success garnering millions of views and a significant amount of press. Trachtenberg eventually made his feature debut with 10 Cloverfield Lane, a low-budget, confined follow-up to shaky-cam kaiju movie Cloverfield. After working with J.J. Abrams on that film, Trachtenberg revitalized the Predator franchise with Prey. Both Trachtenberg and Parsons leveraged internet success into film careers. Like Portal’s gameplay proves, there can be more than one way to navigate the experiment.
The Portal games lean on environmental storytelling, isolation, and a lot of gallows humor. Parsons showed a craftsman’s level of skill working those elements into The Backrooms. His experience transforming a loose internet concept into a commercially successful feature probably also appeals to the makers of a game with little to no hero dialogue and puzzle-based open spaces. The self-admitted Aperture Science-obsessed creator has also proven adept at spinning a vast mythology with a simple front. A skill he can put to work expanding the world of GLaDOS, ATLAS, and P-Body. Valve hasn’t yet announced movement on a Portal movie, but their wait for the right filmmaker to make one could finally be over. Perhaps the cake isn’t a lie after all. We just needed to wait for the right person to bake it.
