Twenty years after it was first announced, Tom Hardy’s Splinter Cell movie is officially dead

If you were still holding out hope for the Splinter Cell movie starring Tom Hardy, I’ve got some bad news: it ain’t happening.

Basil Iwanyk, who has been attached as a producer on the Splinter Cell movie for over a decade, told The Direct that they couldn’t get it off the ground. “That movie would have been awesome… Just couldn’t get it right, script-wise, budget-wise,” Iwanyk said. “But it was going to be great. We had a million different versions of it, but it was going to be hardcore and awesome. That’s one of the ones that got away, which is really sad.”

Based on Tom Clancy’s novels, Splinter Cell centers on Sam Fisher, a highly trained special operative in a fictional black-ops division. He and his team battle international terrorists. The project was first announced as a special feature on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which was released in early 2005. Hardy signed on to star as Fisher in 2012, so this project has been in development for a long time.

Iwanyk spoke of the challenges of getting the project off the ground in 2017. “The challenge of making Splinter Cell interesting was we didn’t have this IP with a very specific backstory,” he explained. “That allowed us to make up our own world and really augment and fill out the characters. I don’t think one applies to the other because I don’t think our movie will feel like a movie that came out of a video game, I think it’ll feel like a badass, Tom Hardy action movie, which is what we wanted.” He added that they wanted to make their movie stand out from other spy movies like James Bond and Jason Bourne. “The good and the bad news is that, obviously, the Bond movies have had a resurgence and the Jason Bourne movies are the Jason Bourne movies, so we’re trying to stay away from those movies in terms of tone, in terms of bad guys, in terms of settings,” he said. “What’s a world that we haven’t seen yet? What’s an area of the world and a conflict that we haven’t really touched upon in movies in a long time, to make it feel fresh?“

Although the Splinter Cell movie isn’t happening, a Splinter Cell anime series is set to be released on Netflix, with Liev Schreiber voicing the main character.