Just in case there was any remaining doubt that video game adaptations are the new comic book movies, another one’s strafing our way — and it’s a biggie! This evening, THR is reporting that Sony’s Columbia Pictures are gearing up to bring Hideo Kojima’s stealth combat franchise Metal Gear Solid to the big screen. And, what’s more, the studio has already found one of the hottest directorial duos around to make it: Final Destination Bloodlines duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein.
With stock in Lipovsky and Stein rising following the critical and commercial success of last year’s Final Destination reboot (Final Destination 7 is, as you may expect, already well on its way), Sony has snapped up the duo on a ‘sweeping and expansive’ first-look deal. This will see the pair make ‘wildly fun, commercial, character-driven, genre-bending films’ for the studio under their own Wonderlab banner — and clearly Solid Snake (Snake! Snaaaaaake!), long since cemented as one of gaming’s very greatest characters, has slithered onto Lipovsky, Stein, and Sony’s radar for the big-screen treatment.
“Metal Gear Solid was nothing short of a groundbreaking cinematic masterpiece that forever revolutionised video games,” said Lipovsky and Stein in a joint statement accompanying today’s announcement. “We are thrilled and honoured to bring Hideo Kojima’s iconic characters and unforgettable world to life.”
The Metal Gear series — so named after the superweapon that special forces operative Snake is recurrently tasked with finding — is renowned for not only creating the blueprint for stealth games and expanding the gaming world’s understanding of what the medium could be, but also for its inherently cinematic nature. The last mainline entry in the series, The Phantom Pain, had almost four hours of Kojima crafted cutscenes, while the one before that — Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots — had over eight hours of ’em, some feature-length on their own. Consider our curiosity piqued to see how, er, solid Snake’s movie debut will be. This is good, isn’t it?
