'Metal Gear Solid' Movie: Jordan Vogt-Roberts Gives Us An Update
It's been almost three years since it was announced that director Jordan Vogt-Roberts was developing a movie based on the popular Metal Gear Solid video game series. While catching up with Jordan to talk about his new film Kong: Skull Island (finally, a monster movie that delivers on the big monster action!), I got an update on the movie adaptation. Get the extensive Metal Gear Solid movie update after the jump.
Hollywood has been trying to make a big screen adaptation of Metal Gear Solid for over a decade now. Sony and producer Michael De Luca announced they would be making a movie in 2007. Writer/director Kurt Wimmer (Total Recall, Equilibrium) was involved, and then there was a brief moment when Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Boogie Nights) was said to be considering the property, but by 2010 the project had fallen into development heck.
A couple years later Spider-Man producer Avi Arad came on board with plans to make an Uncharted movie before tackling the adaptation of Hideo Kojima's wildly popular game series. After his film The Kings of Summer became a sensation at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts was hired to develop Metal Gear Solid into a movie, with Jay Basu (Monsters: Dark Continent) hired to write the MGS screenplay.
That was almost two years ago now and we haven't heard much since. Jordan Vogt-Roberts has spent that time working for Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros to make Kong: Skull Island, and now that his schedule is free again, we asked him for an update on the Metal Gear Solid movie:
It's a brilliant property. That I'm still involved and attached to direct it. Which is like honestly a dream every time I say it out loud. Because that property and that game is like not only like a seminal work, not just in video games, but in all media. And one of the most influential things to me as a kid.
パク・チャヌク監督とジョーダン・ボート＝ロバーツ監督 @VogtRoberts と。 pic.twitter.com/Vq63VhXi8x
— 小島秀夫 (@Kojima_Hideo) February 9, 2017
Jordan has spent time with series creator Hideo Kojima, who recently had a huge public break-up with video game publisher Konami:
It has been amazing getting to know Hideo Kojima over the last couple years. I was just in Japan with him.
As for where the film adaptation is in the process, Jordan says that "we have amazing producers on it" and that he's "developing the script right now." And as a fan of the property and a video game fanatic, Vogt-Roberts understands the challenge ahead of him:
"Everyone understands that it would be such an easy thing to do wrong. It would be so easy to sort of say, Metal Gear Solid is Mission: Impossible. It's not. Metal Gear Solid is G.I. Joe. It's not. Metal Gear Solid is X. It's not. Metal Gear Solid is Metal Gear Solid. There's nothing like Metal Gear Solid on the planet tonally, visually, in terms of characters. Like the characters are walking philosophies. There is nothing like the voice of that game and it's so idiosyncratic to Kojima. And to his team. And unlike comic books that have had writers, hundreds of writers over the course of decades, you've essentially had one person guiding one massive, massive story. And so it's so specific to his point of view. And my job right now when working on the script with the studio is to capture that. Because there would be no greater offense to me on the planet than making a bad Metal Gear movie. That would be a like a Scarlet Letter of epic proportions that I would not be able to live with myself with."
Jordan Vogt-Roberts' new movie Kong: Skull Island hits theaters on March 10th, 2017.