Hollywood has been trying to crack the code on video game movies for decades. As far back as the Super Mario Bros. Movie, they’ve had trouble in converting the gameplay-focused stories to the big screen. The closest we’ve had to success have arguably been Warcraft and the Resident Evil films, and even those couldn’t be called runaway hits.

However, if there’s one video game that could take the transition pretty well, it’s Metal Gear Solid. Ever since the PS1 game hit the console, it was quick to establish itself as an incredibly cinematic experience. This trend continued with Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of Patriots, and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. With each entry, it became all the more obvious that producer Hideo Kojima was working to create cinematic experiences in tandem with the gameplay experiences. It’s with this in mind that a film is all the more plausible.

A few years back, it was announced that Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts would be helming the project, and the news has slowed to a trickle since then. Last we heard, they were still figuring out if it was going to have an R or PG-13 rating. Now, thanks to an interview with Eurogamer, we have another update, and it all sounds promising for the adaptation.

“We’re about to hire a new writer on Metal Gear. It’s probably the most complicated property on the planet. The reasons people love that franchise are – well, you need to run towards those reasons as opposed to away from them. The most beautiful thing for me, the past few months, is that Kong‘s been a success, critically and commercially, and that gave me an incredible amount of freedom to go to Sony and our producers and say we live in a world that’s post-Deadpool and post-Logan. With the success of Kong, that obviously breeds a bit more trust so I can say let’s make the Kojima version of this, the version that commits to the weird and strange and isn’t necessarily what you think a big blockbuster franchise could be.

“Committing to the ideologies, the philosophies, the weirdness and the Japanese elements and the fourth-wall breaking and all these great things, that’s what Metal Gear is, and that’s why the franchise has endured so let’s embrace that as opposed to being afraid of it. We’re working to get a script that the studio says ‘yes, we want to make this’, and it’s something that all the fans can say ‘f**k yeah that’s my Metal Gear’. It’s a tricky thing, there’s a long road ahead but that’s the approach with it.”

So what’s their approach for the film, story-wise? A lot of fans would understandably want them to directly pull from the games, and starting with either Snake Eater or the first Metal Gear Solid for PS1 wouldn’t be a bad way. But it sounds like they plan on taking a bit of a different approach.

“It’s sort of a mix of things. I can’t go into it too much. It’s not a direct adaptation of any particular game. It’d sound too much like a modern statement to call it a remix, because that’s not what it is, but it’s trying to fuse a couple of different storylines together, and it’s all tied together with a device I can’t really talk about right now but that I’m really excited about. I think it’s going to make a movie where people go ‘whoa, I’ve not seen that before’, and that’s very cool. And I think it’s very Kojima in its approach.”

Straight-up, this kind of scares me as a fan of the games (though I admittedly haven’t touched the past two entries). The last time we heard that a film would be a remix of the source material was with The Dark Tower, and we all know how that turned out. The gravity and weight of the world was pulled from the property, and it ended up as a lifeless shell of a film. But I did like Kong: Skull Island, even if it wasn’t quite as great as I’d hoped. All in all, it sounds like we may be in good hands?

What do you think of Vogt-Roberts’ statements? Does all of this sound promising to you, or is it setting off red flags? Let us know down below!

Don’t forget to share this post on your Facebook wall and with your Twitter followers! Just hit the buttons on the top of this page.

SOURCE: Eurogamer