Netflix is adapting the video game series Gears of War into a movie. We don't have all the details yet, but The Hollywood Reporter has it that David Leitch is in talks to direct.
Leitch has a lot of action movie bona fides. In addition to helming movies like Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, and The Fall Guy, he was a kind of shadow director alongside Chad Stahelski on the original John Wick movie. He's also a former stuntman. The guy knows action!
And he'd get plenty of it in Gears of War. There have been nearly 10 Gears of War games released since the original came out back in 2006. There's a ton of lore and backstory Netflix could draw on, but the thrust is that you play as a super-buff, gritty guy named Marcus Fenix who kills bug aliens and kills them good. The game series became famous for a mechanic where you duck behind cover during firefights, a brown-and-gray color palette, and being so earnestly grimdark and badass it could edge into self-parody.
There's plenty there to mine if Leitch wants to mine it. Or the Gears of War movie could end up being a generic action flick we forget three minutes after the credits roll. There's not even a release date set yet, so it'll be a while before we find out.
In any case, it's a good time to be in the video game adaptation business. The Super Mario Bros. Movie made over a billion dollars at the box office and The Last of Us is one of the most talked-about shows on TV. There are still embarrassing projects that harken back to the reputation video game adaptations used to have for being god-awful, like Borderlands, but overall they're it's a fun new frontier filmmakers are exploring more and more.
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h/t The A.V. Club