Video games have had a tough time making the successful transition to the big screen, but 2016 offers promise in the form of two video game adaptations with some serious talent behind the scenes: Duncan Jones’ Warcraft and Justin Kurzel’s Assassin’s Creed. If the curse is indeed broken, that could be good news for Thief, which is also poised to make the jump to the feature film world.
Straight Up Films has acquired the rights to Enix’s video game franchise Thief and will produce the feature film adaptation with Roy Lee and Adrian Askarieh. Lee’s work on The LEGO Movie, the TV series Bates Motel, and the upcoming Minecraft offers promise in the form of experience with incredibly popular IPs, and Aksarieh has experience in the realm of video game adaptations having produced 2007's Hitman and last year’s sequel Hitman: Agent 47.
Adam Mason and Simon Boyes, the duo behind Joe Johnston’s Not Safe for Work, will pen the screenplay for the Thief movie, which is set in a dark, fantasy world ruled by a tyrant who exploits dark magic as a means of establishing control. The hero of the franchise is a master thief who must use his skills to restore freedom and prosperity to the people.
The Thief video game franchise launched in 1998 with Thief: The Dark Project and spawned three sequels, with the most recent entry, simply titled Thief, arriving in 2014. The world of the games offers the opportunity to dive headfirst into a dark fantasy tone, which should stand out in the realm of video game movies. No director is yet attached, but one imagines that'll happen sooner rather than later as Mason and Boyes get to work on the screenplay.
