Metal Gear Solid movie: big budget, could sell PS3's

269w ago - Movie producer Mike De Luca has been talking about his plans for the Metal Gear Solid movie. He says that Kurt Wimmer hasn't yet been chosen to write the script for the game and that many are pitching their ideas on adapting the franchise.

He also said that Sony really want to make this movie work and that the movie could actually sell Playstation's as it is a synergy property. The budget for the movie is also said to be on the "bigger side of things" but not "crazy big".

To quote: Collider: So this is the question that every fan...I'm asking this for every fan...what are you going to do to finally make a kick-ass video game movie?

Mike De Luca: I mean, hopefully not screw it up. For me adapting a video game is just like adapting a book or a play or any other...whenever you're adapting from another medium for film you try to take into account what you need to do to make it a movie. With books it's how you compensate for not being inside a character's head and with video games I think what you have to compensate for is the loss of interactivity, you know.

What makes video games fun is that you get to be the character and you're sitting there ruling the universe and it's a really first person interactive experience. When you're in your theatre seat, you're stuck with these subjective versions of the story and the game from a director or the writer's point of view.

You can't interact with what's going on so whatever turns you on about the game, you're immediately disadvantaged in the theatre because you're not feeling anything which I think ups the ante for how good the story has to be and how good the movie has to be because we're going in at a disadvantage that you're not going to get the excitement or the adrenalin rush of doing it yourself, so we have to do it for you in a way that makes up for that.

So I think the bar is higher and I think in the past, people haven't realized that they set the bar low for video game movies thinking that oh, there's a built in audience and we don't need to go crazy with this movie. We just need to get it out there and people will just go see it anyway. I think that's kind of a rip-off so...

I tried with the first Mortal Combat movie to honor the...I mean that game is like pre-historic at this point but we tried to honor the Enter the Dragon type of storyline of those characters and not throw something out there that was total rip-off and on this one the kind of Cain and Able story between Solid Snake and Liquid Snake and their relationship with their father and the storyline of Metal Gear Solid 4 has the makings... like there's so much story in Metal Gear as opposed to other video games that I think it's going to be a challenge but it's an upscale problem to have some much thematic subtexts and story material to draw from so I think we have a leg up already in that it's such a rich universe and Kojima is like George Lucas in terms of creating this universe so what it says about war by proxy in this kind of future where war has been outsourced to private companies I think can be almost very topical and also kind of satirical in like a "Robocop" kind of way, so I think if we can get a script that honors the storyline of all 4 games, but that also has a cinematic aesthetic you know the kind of aesthetic Verhoeven brought to "Robocop" or the kind of aesthetic the Wachowski's brought to "The Matrix".

If there's a cinematic identity to the piece that exists on its own, it doesn't conflict with the DNA of the game, you know that's our goal is to pull off those 2 things. Not mess with the DNA of the game but provide a movie that is an adaptation but that has it's own cinematic identity so even if you don't play the game you know, you'll come out of that movie feeling like you did at the end of "The Matrix" or the end of "Robocop". That's our goal anyway.