‘Armageddon’ Screenwriter to Write ‘Gears of War’ Film
Universal Pictures have picked up the momentum on their ‘Gears of War’ film adaptation by hiring ‘Armageddon’ scribe Shane Salerno to write the upcoming feature.
Universal acquired the rights to put Microsoft’s hugely popular gaming franchise on the silver screen back in October and have already announced ‘Planet of the Apes‘ producer Dylan Clark as producer.
Salerno will join the project having worked on the screenplays for the Shaft remake (2000), Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007) and Savages (2012), while also being the man with the pen on all four of James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar sequels.
It isn’t yet clear whether the film adaptation of the $1Billion gaming franchise will be a re-telling of the events in the games, or a new story set in the Gears universe, though co-creator Rob Fergusson was quoted as saying “I think you have to let movies be movies. They’re two different mediums, and two different audiences in some cases, and I think some video game movies in the past have failed because they tried to make a movie for gamers. If you have this great IP with a deep backstory and lots of lore that you can make interesting stories out of it’s great, but if you just go after the gaming audience then it isn’t going to be a successful movie.”
The project is being overseen by Jon Mone, Jay Ireland and Marc Sachnoff for Universal, Bluebox and Microsoft respectively.
Video game to movie franchises have traditionally told somewhat reductive stories and have often been maligned by general audiences and hardcore gamers alike, but a recent trend towards big budget adaptations and the opening of several fit-for-purpose film divisions at prominent video game developers has opened up the possibility of there being at least one crossover event movie in the next five years or so.
