Over the years, movies based on video-games rarely live up to expectations, in fact, we're still waiting on a film which will break the so-called "video-game movie curse," but that certainly hasn't stopped studios from trying. Taking a well-regarded game and transforming it into a film isn't the easiest task, and such projects typically take a while to get off the ground, particularly if the game studio is involved. Naughty Dog has been developing movies based upon their Uncharted and The Last of Us franchises, but they've been slow going. Thankfully, Naughty Dog's creative director Neil Druckmann provided updates on both potential movies while speaking at the DICE Summit 2018 (via ScreenRant).
The Uncharted movie, yeah, we’ve had some conversations with Shawn Levy. And he’s really passionate, gets it, and I think he understands where we’re at. We’ve kind of evolved our feelings towards these kind of adaptations over the years. We used to just be excited, ‘Oh, my god, movies are looking at us. There could be an Uncharted movie on the screen.’ And then as more time passes on, we’re not excited about a direct adaptation of the story we told, because we feel like we’ve already told that story very well, cinematically, so I don’t know what else you could bring to it. … [Shawn Levy] wanting to tell a different story than the main four adventures – with potentially a young Nathan Drake, that fills in the gaps – I think is a lot more interesting than trying to retell Uncharted 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Video-games are certainly capable of crafting stories just as powerful as the ones you find in feature-films, but they're not always the easiest to adapt, so it's refreshing to know that Naughty Dog is more interested in crafting a new story for UNCHARTED rather than borrowing a pre-existing story from the franchise. The UNCHARTED film will star Tom Holland as Nathan Drake and will be directed by Shawn Levy, who has said that the story of the treasure hunter's origin will be like "an Indiana Jones story for a generation that didn't grow up on Indiana Jones."
As for THE LAST OF US, well, things aren't looking quite so positive in regards to that adaptation. The last we heard, development on the project was at a standstill, with producer Sam Raimi saying that "Right now it's just sitting there. They don't want to move forward, and it's not my place to say why, and Neil, I think, is in a slight disagreement with them about how things should go so there's a standstill. And I don't have the power to move it." Neil Druckmann provided a brief update on that disagreement, which comes from not wanting the script, which he wrote, to be a direct adaptation of the game.
…And even I worked on the script for The Last of Us film, which was a direct adaptation. And now, having some separation from it, I look back and [am] like, ‘I don’t want that movie to be made.'
Unless something changes, it looks like we'll be seeing the UNCHARTED movie long before THE LAST OF US. Which one are you looking forward to the most?