Call of Duty will no longer be known as just a video game. The Activision-Blizzard first-person shooter is in talks of being adapted into movies. With several scripts in works, the studio hopes to expand the franchise into a cinematic universe.
According to The Guardian, co-presidents of the game studio, Stacy Sher and Nick van Dyk, have planned out a number of films, with the first of the installment aiming for release in 2018.
We have plotted out many years,” says Sher, adding “We put together this group of writers to talk about where we were going. There’ll be a film that feels more like Black Ops, the story behind the story. The Modern Warfare series looks at what it’s like to fight a war with the eyes of the world on you. And then maybe something that is more of a hybrid, where you are looking at private, covert operations, while a public operation is going on.”
Van Dyk adds, “It’s going to have the same sort of high-adrenaline, high-energy aesthetic as the game, but it’s not a literal adaptation. It’s a much more broad and inclusive, global in scope … a big, tent-pole Marvel-esque movie.”
There is definitely a lot of inspiration from the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Van Dyk, a senior executive at Disney, has played a huge part in acquiring and developing the Marvel and Star Wars brand.
He reveals his aim to emulate the way Marvel has created “these individual universes that interconnect and a timeline that makes sense with consistent themes and Easter eggs.”
The plots of the movies will be inspired from existing game plots but not entirely based on them.
This shows his inspiration from the Star Wars franchise as well, for which he gives the example, “the most recent Star Wars movie [Rogue One], was developed around the concept of somebody had to get the plans of the Death Star to Princess Leia. You have that overall construct but there were new characters, there were new plot lines, there was a new history.”
The main concern every Call of Duty fan will have is if the movie will do justice to the movie. So far, no movie based on a video game has ever been successful. From the unspeakable Super Mario Bros, the old Mortal Kombat to the recent Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed, video game movies have become a taboo of sorts for gamers.
