Good news for anyone who’s still broken up over the demise of Peter Jackson’s Halo movie project. Sony is planning to make a movie out of another insanely popular videogame franchise, Metal Gear Solid.
Metal Gear Solid movie rumors are nothing new. For instance early in 2006 Uwe Boll came out and claimed he’d been approached to make one. Don’t worry, it wasn’t true. In summer 2006 we started hearing more rumors of a possible movie but today Variety confirmed it. Michael De Luca has been brought in to produce a Metal Gear Solid movie with the game’s creator Hideo Kojima getting an exec producer credit.
The game’s story centers on a retired solider commando character named Solid Snake. Actually there have been several iterations of the game but Solid Snake is the character everyone knows best. He infiltrates a nuclear weapons disposal to neutralize a terrorist threat and liberate hostages. Pretty standard stuff for Hollywood really, translating it into a movie should be easy. No crazy aliens or massive effects budgets needed as with Halo. The reason Halo stalled was simply the damned thing was too expensive. Metal Gear Solid should be cheaper and therefore easier to get into theaters.
But the real question here is will it be any good? So far, there has never been a really good movie made out of a videogame. They’ve all been failures. Halo had a chance to be the first, because of the rich storyline already in the game for them to build on, and because of the quality people Bungie had involved. It doesn’t sound like Metal Gear’s creators have the kind of control over the property that Bungie had over Halo and that could be trouble. Historically Hollywood has treated these properties like straight to DVD features, making them quickly and then throwing anything up on the screen. Unless Hideo Kojima has the kind of control necessary to prevent that, no matter how good Metal Gear’s source material is that could easily happen again.
