The appetite for game-based movies isn’t slowing down as Columbia Pictures plans to produce a movie adaptation of Sony’s hit game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.
The Uncharted game is a very Tomb Raider-like experience, except it has a guy in the lead role (Nathan Drake) instead of Lara Croft.
Set in lush jungles, the 2007 game was one of the prettiest games around, and it helped the PlayStation 3 grow its audience. It sold more than a million copies in its first 10 weeks.
Naughty Dog developed the game and recently showed off Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, at the recent E3 show in Los Angeles. I thought Uncharted 2 was one of the most promising games this year.
Since the Tomb Raider movies did so well and because the game itself was billed as a “summer blockbuster” action game, it’s not surprising Hollywood came calling.
The screenwriter is Kyle Ward, who is also writing the film adaptation of the Kane & Lynch video game movie. That one stars Bruce Willis. Ward is also writing Hitman 2 for 20th Century Fox. The Hitman movie, based on an Eidos stealth assassination game, was actually pretty entertaining.
The Uncharted movie is being produced by Avi Arad, Charles Roven, Ari Arad and Alex Gartner. Avi Arad, former head of Marvel’s film productions, is also working on a film version of the video game Mass Effect.
Movie adapations of video games go all the way back to Super Mario Bros. of 1993. Some of those, such as Doom and Wing Commander, were critically panned as awful duds, though they still made some money. Others were knock-out hits, including the Tomb Raider trio of movies starring Angelina Jolie, and the Resident Evil movies.