Much like its protagonist, Nathan Drake, the Uncharted movie keeps falling off a cliff.
Deadline reports that due to “scheduling” issues, Travis Knight, the director of Bumblebee, will soon join the growing pile of directors who have been attached to, and subsequently departed, a movie based on the Naughty Dog Sony PlayStation game Uncharted.
This time, the excuse is that star Tom Holland, a later release date.
That all sounds completely plausible…if the past 11 years hadn’t happened.
Our pals at Birth Movies Death have a great rundown of all the people who have been attached to an Uncharted movie since 2008, from director David O. Russell and Wahlberg in the Drake role, to writer Joe Carnahan, Shawn Levy, Dan Trachtenberg, and several others.
This back and forth has literally been happening for over a decade. One would think, with now four games to mine in the franchise, very well-defined characters, tone, and infinite potential storylines, making a movie wouldn’t be that difficult. It’s a modern Indiana Jones! Where could it go wrong? But obviously there’s some kind of problem or here. Or, to put it in Uncharted terms, a curse.
Whether it’s directors who want to make a movie as epic as the games and the studio doesn’t want to pay for it, or…well, that kind of has to be it, right? There could certainly be other reasons but money is obviously a factor. This is all hypothetical, of course, but you can easily imagine none of the scripts have been good enough for Sony to confidently invest a massive amount of money in. Or, conversely, perhaps there have been Sony-approved scripts that haven’t been what the directors wanted to do. If everything was on point and ready to go, Uncharted would have happened well before Holland was cast, or at least in the past two years since he came on board. But it hasn’t.
Whatever the issue is (we still think it’s money), something’s been holding up the Uncharted movie. Forget the inevitable “next new director” announcement; until movie tickets are on sale, nothing will convince us that this movie will a) actually happen and b) actually be good. We hope both those things happen, but this kind of director roulette does not inspire an iota of confidence.
At least we’ll always have this fan film with Nathan Fillion. It’s all we really wanted anyway.