“Kong: Skull Island” director is working on a movie adaptation for video game “Metal Gear Solid”

In an exclusive interview with Collider, filmmaker Jordan Vogt-Roberts has talked about his next and ambitious new project, the movie adaptation for popular video game saga Metal Gear Solid. He has been following the project for the last few years and recently it was announced that he has been the chosen one to take control of the film. Other filmmakers like Paul W.S. Anderson (who already adapted other video games like Mortal Kombat (1995) and the whole Resident Evil movies saga) and Jeremy Bolt, producer of the Resident Evil and Death Race movies, were considered for the position.

Metal Gear Solid is an action-adventure video game developed by Konami and first released for the PlayStation in 1998. The game was created by Hideo Kojima, who was writer, producer and director of the project. Several sequels have appeared for different platforms making the saga one of the most profitable in the video games industry.

The star of the game is Solid Snake, a soldier whose first playable mission was to infiltrate a nuclear weapons facility to neutralize the terrorist threat from FOXHOUND, a renegade special forces unit. Snake must liberate two hostages, the head of DARPA and the president of a major arms manufacturer, confront the terrorists, and stop them from launching a nuclear strike. The game was one of the first to use cinematic cutscenes using the in-game engine and graphics, and voice acting were used throughout the entire game.

Jay Basu and Derek Connolly have been in charge of the screenplay for Metal Gear Solid. This will mark the second time director Jordan Vogt-Roberts directs a feature film with a text by Connolly, since they already worked together in Kong: Skull Island (2017). It is unknown who will play the real-life Solid Snake, the star of the show. Rumors pointed at Christian Bale, but later they got denied. Also, Hideo Kojima has expressed he’d love to see Hugh Jackman in the main role. Will that be his next big hit blockbuster character after retiring from The Wolverine?

In the interview with Collider director Jordan Vogt-Roberts stated “our understanding of genre evolves. Now we have talking raccoons and talking trees in genre movies, and ten years ago, even three years ago that would’ve seemed like a crazy idea…I think there’s a way to lean into all of the oddities and the quirks and the idiosyncrasies of Metal Gear—and people forget Metal Gear is goofy. It’s filled with like military surrealism, it’s filled with these walking, talking philosophical ideologies of characters, it’s filled with almost horror tones at times”.

In a first thought, the director believes a Metal Gear Solid movie adaptation should be rated R, although he mentioned that he would decrease the amount of brutality in order to serve better to the story. “People have forgotten about mutually assured destruction. People have forgotten about nuclear proliferation. People have forgotten about what that type of nuclear fear is. We’ve done a lot of work to make the Metal Gears themselves relevant in a very cool way”.