Tom Holland And Uncharted Director Making Another Fan-Favorite Video Game Movie?
Is Tom Holland tackling another video game property after Uncharted?
This article is more than 2 years old
Their new film has not even been released yet, but film star Tom Holland and director Ruben Fleischer are already in discussion for their followup. It turns out that the duo behind the upcoming, much-delayed video game adaptation movie Uncharted are in plans for another Playstation-derived movie: Jak & Daxter. For context, we recently reported that the Spider-Man: No Way Home star had revealed in an interview that he had a hankering to adapt the Playstation game series Jak & Daxter. Then it just so happened that Fleischer, the director he has been working with for quite some time, coincidentally is actually working on an adaptation of said video game franchise. What luck, right?
To be fair, there are constantly unrealized projects swirling around in Hollywood at all times. At any point in the last several years, Sony Pictures has been trying to get at least three different Spider-Man spinoff films to the big screen. And this is definitely a boom time for video game films. While the concept of adapting a video game into a movie once led us into the depths of Bob Hoskins as Super Mario and the Jean-Claude Van Damme Street Fighter: The Movie, movies like Uncharted are actually shaping up pretty well. The final trailer released for the Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg vehicle has a pretty impressive airship, and you can never go wrong with Antonio Banderas as a sinister villain. So it will remain to be seen if this Jak & Daxter actually comes to fruition, but considering Holland and Fleischer actually got Uncharted to theaters after years of development hell and Covid-19 delays, it seems pretty promising.
This is also a great time specifically for adaptations of Naughty Dog video games. Aside from the Tom Holland/Mark Wahlberg Uncharted, one of their other major franchises is currently in production as a limited series with HBO. The Last of Us will star Pedro Pascal and is reputedly the largest television production ever done in Canada. Jak & Dexter would round out the trifecta of Naughty Dog’s most famous series. While Jak & Dexter already has a steampunk vibe and a plot that involves a human being turned into a mythological weasel-like figure and his buddy trying to turn him back, Holland reputedly would like to make it even weirder. Per an interview with Gamespot, he said:
But I would make it at A24, so it was really weird and like dark. I would do like a really weird, live-action version of Jak and Daxter.”
For context, A24 is the film distribution company specializing in elevated horror films. Some of their notable recent releases have included a dark fable about a human-sheep hybrid and Batman Robert Pattinson getting really loaded with Green Goblin Willem Dafoe in a lighthouse. They are particularly noted for their incredibly intense and disquieting explorations of the human psyche and relationships . So, that is Tom Holland’s vision for Jak & Dexter with director Ruben Fleischer. An exciting new world of video adaptations, to be sure! As Jak & Dexter is in very early talks, no word on when it might start production, but if nothing else goes wrong, Uncharted will hit theaters on February 18.
