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.”
Rival game publishers are steering clear of GTA VI
Zelnick has called GTA VI the “most anticipated entertainment property of all time,” and the rest of the industry seems to agree. Publishers have largely moved their releases out of its way, leaving this quarter unusually quiet.
“This Fall has been the most depressed Fall we’ve ever seen in terms of game volume,” Colan Neese, senior vice president of gaming at research firm Screen Engine/ASI, tells Fortune. “Basically every game that was going to come out this Fall tried to release in September and then it just fell off a cliff in October.”
The only other major releases this month look like counterprogramming. Blizzard launched World of Warcraft: Forever on Nov. 4, and Nintendo released its remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Switch 2 on Nov. 5.
The former is a PC and Mac game, platforms GTA VI won’t reach at launch. The latter is family-friendly and sells to a different crowd than GTA does.
GTA VI’s shadow could stretch into the new year. “It’s going to be really hard for a game to break through in December,” says Neese. “And then the question goes, how long does that shadow last? Does it go into January? Does it go into February?”
Neese points to Sony, which pushed God of War Laufey from Feb. 16 to May 20, 2027, a move he reads as steering clear of GTA VI. Sony’s Santa Monica Studio said the extra time would go toward “putting in the finishing touches.”
Why GTA VI pulls in Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z at once
Hollywood may feel the squeeze, too. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens Nov. 20, the day after GTA VI, in what Fortune has called a thin November box office that GTA VI is set to test. In December, Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three both open on the 18th, each vying to be the entertainment event of the year.
Little do they know that their greatest competitor might be a video game with a vast, multigenerational audience.
“Grand Theft Auto VI is a unicorn game because it’s reaching elder millennials and young Gen Xers who grew up on Grand Theft Auto III through Grand Theft Auto V. It was a decade where they released multiple Grand Theft Autos and we all grew up with the game, played it constantly, and then it culminated with GTA V, and then it just went away when we went into our thirties.
“Now, we’re in our forties and all of a sudden, we have a new Grand Theft Auto and we’re all excited to ride the nostalgia,” explains Neese.
“Then you have an entire generation who only had one Grand Theft Auto game, which is Gen Z,” Neese continues. “They grew up with Grand Theft Auto V streamer culture on Twitch and YouTube. They had Grand Theft Auto V and then Grand Theft Auto Online, which has also brought in early Gen Alpha.
“So, you have this really interesting moment where multiple generations are just going to be sucked into this thing.”
How Rockstar earned the hype
Rockstar has a track record that justifies the anticipation. Between GTA V and VI, the studio released Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, which has shipped more than 89 million units and remains one of the best-selling games of all time.
GTA VI itself was delayed twice, first from fall 2025 to May 2026 and then to Nov. 19, giving Rockstar more time to polish what Neese sees as a landmark.
“They purposely built a new engine. They’ve made it incredibly realistic,” says Neese. “They did a lot of research into the Southern Florida setting and culture and tried to bring this world to life.
“They put a lot of research, time, and technology into making this and it’s the pinnacle of game creation for humans. It’s like the Sistine Chapel or the Notre-Dame of what a game can be made by humans, and candidly, I don’t know if we’ll ever see the likes of this again.”
Former Take-Two CEO Ben Feder made a similar case in Fortune this week, arguing that GTA VI will be the last pre-AI blockbuster video game of its kind.
Gaming’s growth leaves Hollywood playing catch-up
If 2013 doesn’t seem like that long ago, consider that the gap between then and now is longer than the stretch between the first and last Harry Potter movies, or between Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens. It’s also longer than the full runs of era-defining shows like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Office, Friends, and Seinfeld.
Meanwhile, the gaming industry has boomed. Americans spent $60.7 billion on video games in 2025, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2026 Essential Facts report, nearly triple the roughly $21 billion they spent in 2013.
The same report counts 212.3 million Americans who play video games, about two-thirds of the population. By comparison, 53% of U.S. adults told the Pew Research Center in 2025 that they had seen a movie in a theater in the past year.
Mainstream entertainment companies seem to be waking up to gaming’s potential as its core audience comes of age. Earlier attempts to adapt video games for the big screen were poorly received, but this year The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has grossed more than $1 billion worldwide and Resident Evil about $410 million.
TV series such as The Last of Us, Arcane, and Fallout have proved successful, too.
“Part of the challenge with gaming adaptations for the longest time was that you had a generation of people who never actually played or experienced the IP. Now, they have a relationship to it,” concludes Neese.
If traditionalist attitudes still siphon video games into a niche corner of the entertainment industry, Nov. 19 may be a referendum on that outlook. GTA VI stands to show how much a single game can disrupt the broader entertainment business and hold an audience’s attention for months at a time.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com