Xbox Launches a Film and TV Division, Says It's Not a Production Company

Kayleen Walters, an executive producer of "A Minecraft Movie," will run XP, which Xbox says will work through creative partners.

The executive who helped put Minecraft on movie screens now has the rest of Xbox's games to shop around Hollywood.

Xbox on Thursday named Kayleen Walters, who ran Minecraft maker Mojang Studios and was an executive producer of "A Minecraft Movie," president of XP, a new division for film and TV adaptations, merchandise, sponsorships and live events from broadcasts to theme parks, TheWrap reported. Maria Angelidou-Smith, who led Facebook Groups at Meta and later held senior jobs at Reddit, takes over Mojang and Minecraft on Oct. 19.

Anyone hoping that means a new studio hiring in town got a disclaimer the same day. "XP is about finding the right creative partners. It is not a production company," Xbox said in comments GamesBeat published.

The line lands on a company with a Hollywood past. GamesBeat recalled Xbox Entertainment Studios, launched in 2012, which ended in failure and Hollywood layoffs, along with a Steven Spielberg "Halo" film that never got made. The "Halo" TV series that did get made was canceled by Paramount+ after two seasons.

The ambition hasn't shrunk, though. Matthew Ball, Xbox's chief strategy officer, wrote on Xbox Wire that the goal is to be "the number one entertainment company in the world." The plan is to own the worlds and let other people film them. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's staff memo calls the film and TV branch Xbox Pictures; its siblings handle licensing, brand deals and theme parks.

The reason is the games. Xbox said hours played on "Fallout" titles in Game Pass rose fivefold while the show's first season ran on Prime Video, and Minecraft's weekly active players were up more than 75% from a year earlier after the movie. In Sharma's telling, "A Minecraft Movie" was last year's biggest film in the U.S.; GamesBeat puts its box office at $960 million.

The pipeline Walters inherits is already moving. Xbox said "Minecraft Squared," the sequel she's producing, is in production. A "Call of Duty" movie from Peter Berg and Taylor Sheridan is on the way, Netflix has a "Diablo" animated series and Prime Video has confirmed a third season of "Fallout."

What none of it says is where the work happens. Neither Sharma's memo nor Ball's post names a home base for XP or a place its projects will shoot, and the memo's one travel note is Sharma's trip to Stockholm to see the Mojang team. That's the question that counts here, where unions say most jobs on big studio movies are now outside the U.S.

It's also landing on a company still cutting. The launch arrives a little more than a month after Xbox laid off 268 more employees and moved the next "Halo" game to Activision, TheWrap noted, and GamesBeat says layoffs across Xbox's game divisions since June are expected to reach 3,200 jobs.

"Fans don't just play our franchises. They watch them, wear them, attend them," Walters wrote in an email to her new team that GamesBeat published. Who gets paid to build the watching part, and in what city, rides on whichever partners Xbox signs next.

Source: TheWrap, retrieved October 8, 2026. Other sources: gamesbeat.com.