In 2018, British videogame company Rebellion joined the film and TV business. Film Stories got a guided tour of its Didcot studio – and met its maverick CEO, Jason Kingsley.
Most film studios are what you might call a blank canvas – big, airy, empty spaces where filmmakers can build sets and create their own worlds. Rebellion Film Studios, as co-founder and CEO Jason Kingsley admits, is intentionally something rather different: a hard-edged, industrial space that has its age and history already embedded in it.
“A lot of studios are just big sheds,” Kingsley notes. “But you’ve got to build everything. I always quite liked the Hollywood approach of having backlot sets that are sort of semi-permeable. ‘Here’s a New York street’. I felt we could do the same with sci-fi. Doctor Who could be filmed here… you could do a Mad Max equivalent, or horror movies, or an action adventure, or a Judge Dredd-type thing with a little bit of science fiction. That kind of stuff.”
Atypical
Sitting with Kingsley, it becomes immediately clear he isn’t your typical hard-nosed boss of a multi-million pound company. His hair is long; he’s casually dressed in what appears to be a leather waistcoat, and he has the casual air of a rock guitarist. In his spare time, Kingsley dresses up as a knight and charges about on horses; he even has a YouTube channel, Modern History TV, dedicated to his love of all things mediaeval. But Kingsley is also an academic at heart, and when the conversation turns to the algorithm-based decision making of a streaming giant like Netflix, he segues into an anecdote about studying zoology, a field trip on a beach, and a dead seagull.
All of which is to say that Rebellion has its own unique way of doing things. A firm previously best known for its videogames, Rebellion officially joined the film business in 2021 with School’s Out Forever, a low-budget comedy-horror that was released unfortunately close to the pandemic.
“It was bad timing, arguably,” Kingsley says, “but it was very interesting, so we wanted to do more of it. So we were looking for space, and we couldn’t find anywhere because everyone was booked up. We were new entrants in the film industry, so we were bottom of the list, really. ‘Here, you can have this shed for three days.’ So we thought, ‘Right, sod it: we’ll find a big space.’”
Before Rebellion bought the building in 2018, it was a gigantic printing facility for the Daily Mail. Located in Didcot, Oxfordshire, next to a railway line and even closer to a National Grid power station, its perimeter is surrounded by high fences and angry rings of razor wire. Today, the colossal printing press – which must have been the size of several double decker buses – is gone, leaving behind a gigantic echoing chamber that Rebellion can use to make its own movies or hire out to other studios as a production space.
Rogue
At the time of writing, Rebellion’s in post-production on a movie adaptation of Rogue Trooper, based on the 2000 AD comic strip and directed by Moon and Source Code’s Duncan Jones. A sci-fi action thriller brought to life using Avatar-style performance capture, it’ll feature Aneurin Barnard, Hayley Atwell, Asa Butterfield and Sean Bean among its cast.
“It was great seeing quite well-known actors here,” Kingsley says, the tone of his voice implying that even he can’t entirely believe there were so many famous faces milling around in his building. “It’s quite a good cast. They really liked the location as well. Because it’s fun, coming to a new place – often [actors] go to the same places again and again for their jobs.”
Rogue Trooper is evidently being kept top secret, given that we could see no evidence of it as we toured the studio’s various departments and sound stages. “We’ve got a tonne of stuff to do,” Kingsley says when we ask about the project’s status. “Because we’re creating synthetic environments. So my best guess is [you’ll see Rogue Trooper] sometime next year. I’d like it to be sooner, but everything takes longer than you think.”
Founded by Jason Kingsley and his brother Chris in 1992, Rebellion has since become something rather rare: a British videogame studio that is both successful and still independent. As it’s grown via the success of the hard-edged first-person shooter series Sniper Elite and horror spin-off Zombie Army, Rebellion has opened studios in locations including Liverpool, Leeds and Warwick. It has used its profits to snap up the rights to a wealth of British comic brands, and now owns 2000AD and by extension its characters – such as Judge Dredd and the aforementioned Rogue Trooper.
“2000 AD wasn’t in a healthy state when we took it over,” Kingsley says. “It was on a decline. We reinvigorated it, and gathered together a whole bunch of comic titles. And we’ve now got probably the biggest library of comic book work in the world, certainly in the English language. I’m very proud of it.”
Archives
Rebellion’s archive also includes rare work from such artists as Superman creator Jerry Siegel and Watchmen writer Alan Moore – titles the company is gradually digging out and re-publishing under its Treasury of British Comics banner. “We’re working out how to make some of these brilliant tales readable again, because they’re stuck in our bloody archive and nobody gets to see them,” says Kingsley. “We own the rights to some brilliant creative work, some creators who became household names.”
As of 2024, the videogame industry is vastly bigger and more valuable than film or TV, and with research suggesting that younger audiences are turning away from traditional filmed entertainment in favour of stuff like TikTok or Twitch, it’s arguable that film and TV needs gaming more than the reverse. Which begs the question: why bother going to the risk of expanding into a crowded, perhaps even declining entertainment sector?
“Pretty much every business decision I’ve ever made has been based on, ‘Is this going to be fun,’” Kingsley says with a twinkle in his eye. “Does it make business sense? It doesn’t necessarily have to make a profit, but is it going to make a massive loss? Does it have a potential for profit? I’ve always been interested in storytelling since I was a little boy […] And it always struck me that it would be nice to also make screen content – film and TV – because I grew up with it. It’s very influential. I think the whole of the games industry grew up with film and TV as big influences.”
The tour
Down on the ground floor of the building, there’s an entire, outsized room absolutely stuffed with costumes and props. There are soldiers’ outfits from 19th and 20th century wars; racks of swords and guns; dresses and ball gowns, and vast arrays of boots and shoes.
Production supervisor Tim Pounds-Cornish, leading us on the tour, tells us that the costumes once belonged to a company called Flame Torbay, which Rebellion bought in 2021. The contents of their collection were brought to Didcot in trucks, and it was soon discovered that not all of it was sorted. Pounds-Cornish points to a bin full of footwear that have yet to be grouped into matching pairs.
In another airy warehouse space, Rebellion has motion capture facilities, having acquired the VFX company Audiomotion in 2022. It was here that Duncan Jones gathered the reference data for Rogue Trooper, while the same space has also been used to do the performance capture for Rebellion’s games. Elsewhere, there’s a workshop for making props – it’s packed with spray booths, woodworking equipment and 3D printers. Like the costume department, this was once a separate company, Astounding Props, which has since been brought into the Rebellion fold; its credits include Ant-Man And The Wasp, Snow White and The Crown.
It feels as though Kingsley, and by extension Rebellion, has a magpie’s eye for the interesting and unusual. In the motion capture space sit a pair of gigantic workstations taken from a nuclear power station. All CRT monitors and chunky buttons and switches, they look like something from 1979’s Alien; the workstations were going to be scrapped, but someone at Rebellion thought they looked so impressive that they decided to give them a new home.
Ahead
There are also plans to extend Rebellion’s film production facilities beyond what’s already here. Opening a gigantic set of electric doors, Pounds-Cornish shows us a patch of wasteland which he says will one day be a soundstage; an old industrial unit next to it will also be knocked down and turned into a second production facility.
Meanwhile, much of Hollywood is alternately fascinated and terrified by the possibilities of generative AI. In February came the report that actor-producer Tyler Perry was so stunned by OpenAI’s Sora – a bit of software which appears to turn text prompts into photoreal moving images – that he abandoned plans to give his Atlanta production facility an $800m expansion.
Rebellion’s head of film, TV and publishing, Ben Smith, on the other hand, is quite sanguine about AI and what it might mean for filmmaking. “AI is a tool that has been a part of videogames for a long time, so it doesn’t scare us,” Smith says. “I think AI is a catch-all for a lot of different technologies. Sora looks amazing, but how much of that can be turned into practical filmmaking? Fundamentally, you’ll still need stages to film human beings on. Humans react to humans. So no, whatever opportunity AI represents, whatever that may be for the future, it’s not holding us back from investing in this site and developing a cutting-edge film studio.”
Smith wouldn’t be drawn on exactly what Rebellion’s plans are for the broad array of characters and properties under its banner. The bullet-strewn war setting of its hugely popular Sniper Elite games seem like a logical fit for a film or TV series; then there’s Judge Dredd, arguably the crown jewel among the various intellectual properties under Rebellion’s ownership. All Smith will say of the Judge Dredd TV series Mega-City One, first announced in 2017, is that it’s “still in development”. Kingsley, who co-produced the 2012 Dredd film with his brother simply says, “We’ve got the rights back, and maybe one day we’ll make a sequel.”
Given the scale of the facilities Rebellion has set up, though, it clearly has big plans for the future – and whatever those film or TV projects are likely to be, they’ll almost certainly be in the sci-fi and fantasy genres that Kingsley talks about with such youthful enthusiasm.
“There’s no point in having toys and then giving them away for others to play with,” Kingsley says. “We’ve always wanted to do our own thing and be involved. Because at the end of the day, it’s why we run the business: not solely to make money, but to have fun and make enough money to reinvest in doing something else fun. That’s the ethos.
That’s why we’re still a privately-owned company – my brother and I own the company. We don’t have external shareholders. We don’t have an external board. We don’t have a CEO who’s paid a huge amount of money – we’ve got me. I’m paid reasonably well, but not the standards of multinational CEOs. And that’s deliberate – because I want to have fun.”
