Video games have become the next big source of material for big screen adaptation, something which is somewhat surprising considering the difficulty that filmmakers have had transforming said games into movies so far. We recently saw the first trailer for the forthcoming Sonic the Hedgehog movie, and on the heels of that comes news that director F. Gary Gray is now in development on a movie based on the Saints Row franchise.
The Saints Row games have covered four installments with the first game being released in 2006 and the fourth coming out in 2013. The storyline follows a street gang called the Third Street Saints as they battle rival gangs for control of terf, become a multimedia conglomerate, and eventually battle space aliens who have invaded the planet earth.
As you can tell by that description, the Saints Row games get a little... weird. Originally, the games were little more than Grand Theft Auto clones. You moved throughout an open world city completing missions, that usually involved committing crimes, in order to progress the story.
However, as the series progressed, it found a way to stand out from its competition by completely shifting its tone. While the basic game structure remained the same, missions and plots became more over the top and wild. The addition of, frequently mature, humor not found in Grand Theft Auto helped the series find a fan base all its own which has made Saints Row one of the more popular recent game franchises of the last few years.
If you require an example of the exact nature of Saints Row, let me direct you to part of the opening sequence of Saints Row IV, in which your character successfully disarms a nuclear weapon while riding the missile and Aerosmith's "Don't Want to Miss a Thing" plays in the background. No, this doesn't make any more sense if you've played the game.
According to Deadline, Greg Russo, who is also handling the script for the planned Mortal Kombat movie reboot is also writing the Saints Row movie.
While the Fast and Furious franchise may not have quite reached the level of camp that the Saints Row games embrace quite yet, those films have certainly become a little more insane themselves in recent years.
In The Fate of the Furious our heroes drive on ice while being chased by a submarine and The Rock diverts a torpedo with his bare hands. That's just the sort of thing you might expect to see in a Saints Row game.
And so, it's perfect to know that the director of The Fate of the Furious, F. Gary Gray, is looking at directing a Saints Row movie. The franchise basically requires over the top, slightly bonkers stunts and action, so Gray might be the perfect man to pull off such a film.
The joke has been that the only thing left for the Fast and Furious franchise to do is go to space. Considering the most recent Saints Row game did exactly that, we could essentially get a Fast and Furious in space movie without the actual film franchise having to get quite that extreme.
F. Gary Gray's most recent film Men in Black International is getting ready to debut in June. It sounds like Saints Row could be his next project.
