Though Sony has been trying for nearly 10 years, the studio still hasn’t been able to adapt the popular video game series Uncharted into a blockbuster movie.
It’s experienced a revolving door of directors and that door continues to spin, because Real Steel and Night at the Museum director Shawn Levy, the fourth person to be attached, has now vacated the position as well.
Levy has found additional stars for his videogame-focused action-comedy movie Free Guy, which will star Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer. 20th Century Fox has green-lit the project and shooting is scheduled to begin in April, which means that Levy has had to step away from directing Uncharted, making it yet another director loss for the project with a notably tumultuous history.
Tom Holland (Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Impossible) is still attached to play a young version of video game protagonist Nathan Drake, a globe-trotting treasure hunter who’s a descendant of Sir Francis Drake. In the games, Drake teams with a journalist named Elena Fisher and his old friend and mentor Victor Sullivan to discover lost cities and save the world – they’re cinematic, fast-paced, and in my mind, the perfect action-adventure games. Drake is a guy who flies by the seat of his pants, a crack shot who’s always ready with a loaded gun and a witty retort – think a more modern Indiana Jones, like a real Nathan Fillion type. (Fillion starred in a fan film earlier this year.) By exploring a younger take on the character, it seemed as if screenwriter Joe Carnahan (Smokin’ Aces, The Grey) was going to be able to sidestep some of the inherent problems of bringing a video game to the big screen. It’s unclear if Carnahan’s finished script is still in play, but the movie adaptation is back in limbo again.
Other directors in the past have been David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook, Three Kings) who was attached back in 2010 with Mark Wahlberg playing a more traditional version of Nathan Drake, and that iteration was courting Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci to play supporting roles. A few months later, Limitless director Neil Burger had replaced Russell in the director’s chair. That lasted until 2014, when Burger exited and Seth Gordon (The King of Kong, Horrible Bosses) signed on. He left the next year, and Levy came on board in 2016.
News of an Uncharted movie first broke in 2009. Kyle Ward, the original scriptwriter, was the first figure to drop out of the movie that same year. Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer were hired in his place.
Will this movie ever get made?
With the games being so popular and successful it’s unlikely that Sony will abandon the concept (they already own the intellectual property rights, since the games were developed for their PlayStation platform). But at this point, the film might be as cursed as the gold of El Dorado in the game.
(Excerpts) Read More at: PasteMagazine.com and SlashFilm.com