From Gen X to Gen Z, ‘unicorn game’ GTA VI’s multigenerational pull is a threat to Hollywood’s holiday blockbusters

Detailed summary

Thirteen years after GTA V, GTA VI arrives with more than $1 billion in sales already booked and a gaming calendar cleared for it.

Thirteen years after its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto VI finally arrives on Nov. 19. The sixth installment in Rockstar Games’ open-world crime series launches on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and its pull is likely to be felt well beyond gaming, wherever other entertainment competes for the same audience’s time.

When Grand Theft Auto V came out in 2013, it generated $800 million in sales in its first 24 hours. It has since sold nearly 235 million units, according to parent company Take-Two Interactive’s latest earnings release.

The new game is on pace to crush those numbers. Sensor Tower estimates GTA VI had logged about 12.1 million digital preorders worth roughly $1.18 billion as of the morning of Nov. 13.

If it were a movie, GTA VI would already be one of the year’s top-grossing films. Its preorders alone top the roughly $1.01 billion that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has grossed worldwide, according to The Numbers’ 2026 worldwide box office chart.

The stakes for Take-Two are enormous. Analysts estimate the publisher has spent $1 billion to $1.5 billion on the game, as Fortune has reported on CEO Strauss Zelnick’s bet. Earlier this month, Take-Two held its forecast of $8 billion to $8.2 billion in net bookings for the fiscal year ending in March, saying preorders were running well ahead of its expectations.

Fans are clearing their calendars. In a survey of nearly 1,500 users by digital marketplace G2A.com, 29% said they had already requested time off from work or school to play the game. G2A also says its preorders surged 152% week over week in the most recent seven days.

That kind of planned absence has fueled viral estimates of what GTA VI will cost the U.S. economy, though economists told Fortune those fears are overblown.

G2A founder Bartosz Skwarczek tells Fortune, “GTA VI is much more than a game launch. It’s a global cultural moment that shows just how deeply gaming has become part of people’s lives.”

Zelnick has called GTA VI the “most anticipated…

Opening of the article, excerpted from Fortune. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.