Until his death in 2013, Tom Clancy’s books have been a constant source of material for Hollywood thrillers of high political contents of the last 3 decades. If I name The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), The Sum of All Fears (2002) or Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) one can get an idea. But what not so many people know is that he was an avid videogames aficionado and has been collaborating with several developers since the early Rainbow Six (1998).
Tom Clancy’s The Division is an action role-playing video game created by Clancy, developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft. The game was released for the platforms, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in March 2016. It is set in a near future New York City in the aftermath of a smallpox pandemic. In the game, the player is a Special Agent of the eponymous Strategic Homeland Division, commonly referred to as simply “The Division“, and is tasked with helping the group rebuild its operations in Manhattan, investigate the nature of the outbreak, and combating criminal activity in its wake.
Stephen Gaghan, writer and director of Syriana (2005), was first attached to write and direct the movie adaptation for The Division, but at the end, the chosen one to get behind the camera has been David Leitch. A professional stunts performer, since the 1990s, having participated in titles like Blade (1998), Fight Club (1999), Ghosts of Mars (2001) or Constantine (2005), he switched roles when he co-directed some of the scenes of John Wick (2014) together with his fellow former stunt artist Chad Stahelski. Since then he has been responsible for Atomic Blonde (2017), Deadpool 2 (2018) and also has been announced to be in charge of Hobbs and Shaw (2019), The Fast and the Furious (2001) spin-off centered in the characters played by Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.
In this adaptation of The Division, on Black Friday in New York City, bio-terrorists release a modified strain of Smallpox called the “Green Poison” onto several amounts of currency bills. This results in the disease spreading rapidly and before long society in NYC has collapsed – resulting in the activation of the Strategic Homeland Division. The movie has not started the pre-production yet, but it has been announced that actors Jessica Chastain and Jake Gyllenhaal will star. This will be the second time Jake Gyllenhaal stars in a videogame-based movie after Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010). Let’s hope this time the result is not as dull as the previous one.
