Uncharted Movie Shooting Early 2015

By The_Night_Rider on July 20, 2014@manlymovie

While Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystall Skull was upsetting (a few) fans when it came out, around the same time a big budget cinematic game was released that successfully riffed on the original Jones trilogy. The Uncharted series was Indiana Jones with thumbsticks. So it isn’t surprising to hear a movie is being made.

That movie will supposedly shoot early next year, according to its director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses): “I think very early next year. That’s the plan.” Though that is months from now, he notes, “That’s like tomorrow, essentially, because the prep is so complicated for the movie.” Gordon says the setting of the movie will be “very international” and “all over the world.”

One of the pitfalls of a game adaptation is that directors are often called in who have never touched the source material and go off and do their own thing. The man originally pegged to direct, David O. Russell, did such a thing, when he caused a minor furore by coming a concept for a movie that was completely alien to the series, but still called Uncharted. Worse, Russell wanted to hire Mark Wahlberg as Nathan Drake (the lead character). Russell departed from the project unceremoniously after fan uproar, and, (please God) took wooden pest Wahlberg with him.

Anyway, the new director has been assuaging fan ire on authenticity:

“It’s going to honor the mythology of the game, but I would say honor some of the most interesting stuff from the first one and build from there. There’s some stuff that isn’t in the game. I love the complexity and frankly the sophistication of the storytelling in the game, and we aspire to that — but don’t want to tell the exact same story, of course — so something that doesn’t break the rules of what it did but expands. Because I feel like the people who play the games and know them well don’t want to just see the same story told. You want extra shades.”

An interesting question is, who could play Drake? A lot of people have been clamoring for Nathan Fillion (good choice), but some time ago while watching The Freezer, a coarse movie about a man kidnapped by Russian mobsters, I noticed that Dylan McDermott was a dead ringer for Nathan Drake. What about him? At any rate, let’s hope they don’t fuck it up and count our lucky stars that Paul W.S. Anderson did not get a phonecall.