Xbox has a new division called XP that will handle movies, TV shows, merchandise, brand deals and live events built on its game franchises. CEO Asha Sharma announced it Thursday in a staff memo published on Xbox Wire and named Kayleen Walters as its president.
Walters moves over from Mojang, where she was president of the Minecraft studio. Before Xbox she spent 13 years at Lucasfilm working on Star Wars films, products and partnerships. At Mojang she grew Minecraft’s consumer products line to more than 250 licensees and was an executive producer on A Minecraft Movie, which Sharma’s memo calls the biggest film in the U.S. last year. She is also a producer on the sequel, Minecraft Squared.
What XP Covers
The name is short for experience points. Sharma’s memo splits the division into four groups:
- Xbox Pictures handles film and television adaptations.
- Xbox Products handles licensing and merchandise.
- Xbox Partnerships handles sponsors and brand partners.
- Xbox Places handles broadcasts, in-person events, theme parks and other location-based attractions.
Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball wrote in a companion Xbox Wire post that this work was already happening on separate teams across the company. XP puts those teams under one president.
XP will license and partner. IGN reports that Microsoft does not consider it a production company and plans to find outside partners for film, TV, physical experiences and consumer products. The existing hits were made the same way: Warner Bros. released A Minecraft Movie, and Amazon makes Fallout for Prime Video.
Walters said the teams inside XP are the ones responsible for helping Xbox franchises “show up in the world in bigger, more meaningful ways.”
What Is Already in the Pipeline
Xbox Pictures starts with a slate that was in motion before the division existed. Minecraft Squared is in production. Fallout season 3 is coming to Prime Video. Peter Berg and Taylor Sheridan are making a Call of Duty movie, and Netflix has an animated Diablo series. Microsoft’s publishing deal with Hideo Kojima for the stealth game Physint also includes film and TV rights.
More is in development. Entertainment Weekly reported earlier this year that Xbox has over a dozen film and TV projects in the works, and chief content officer Matt Booty told the magazine, “We’ve got over 20 franchises that have made a billion dollars, lifetime.” Booty also said Xbox will keep investing in Halo after the Paramount series was cancelled. Separately, Puck reported that Microsoft has pitched a rights package covering more than a dozen games, including Halo, World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls and Diablo, to Netflix, Paramount and Universal, with an asking price above $300 million.
The other three groups have existing business to work with as well. BlizzCon drew 35,000 people to Anaheim in September and 12.5 million viewers online. The latest Minecraft Live reached more than 144 million people. Microsoft pointed to the Gears of War takeover with WWE and the Xbox furniture line at Ikea as examples of the partnerships side, and a Minecraft theme park is scheduled to open next year.
Microsoft also shared numbers on what adaptations do for the games. Fallout titles on Game Pass saw five times the hours played while season 1 of the show was airing. Minecraft’s weekly active users were up more than 75 percent year over year after the movie, measured through April 30, 2026.
Microsoft Tried This Once Before
In 2012 Microsoft hired former CBS entertainment president Nancy Tellem to start Xbox Entertainment Studios, which was supposed to make original TV for Xbox Live. Its slate included shows based on Gears of War, Fable, Forza and State of Decay, plus a Halo series with Steven Spielberg as executive producer. It released the street soccer series Every Street United, the documentary Atari: Game Over and Halo: Nightfall before Microsoft closed it in 2014, cutting about 200 jobs as part of a companywide layoff of 18,000.
That studio produced its own shows and distributed them on Xbox consoles. XP sends franchises out to studios and streamers that already have theatrical and subscriber audiences, which is how A Minecraft Movie and Fallout reached people who had never owned an Xbox.
A New Boss at Mojang
With Walters moving to XP, Maria Angelidou-Smith joins Xbox as CEO of Mojang and Minecraft. She spent nearly a decade at Meta working on Facebook Groups, then worked at Personio and was chief product officer at Reddit. Sharma said her first job is to learn from the Mojang teams and the Minecraft community.
XP arrives in the middle of the restructuring Sharma calls the Reset. The Wall Street Journal reported that she announced plans in July to cut 3,200 Xbox jobs, about 20 percent of staff, and reduce the number of games Xbox makes. IGN puts the cuts so far this fiscal year at nearly 2,000. The same Journal report said licensing more Xbox material for film and TV was part of her plan from the start.
Sources: Xbox Wire, IGN, Variety, Quartz, Thurrott, Dark Horizons, The Wall Street Journal
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