Fresh off of his directorial effort for Kong: Skull Island (and ripping CinemaSins apart for their takedown of the film), Jordan Vogt-Roberts has unleashed a surprising follow-up project: A live-action launch trailer for the Bungie/Activision game, Destiny 2. The sci-fi looter-shooter sequel, which arrives on console September 6th and on PC October 24th, capitalizes on the success and community of the original title as it looks to expand the players' experiences and the game's mythology.

One character fans of Destiny will recognize right off the bat is the wise-cracking Cayde-6, as voiced by the incomparable Nathan Fillion. He guides a trio of bright-eyed newcomers through this ravaged world and outfits them with the only thing that will get them through it: really big guns. Vogt-Roberts spoke at length about getting the opportunity to shoot this trailer and how it impacted his plans for the Metal Gear Solid movie, but first thing's first:

Check out the new live-action trailer for Destiny 2 below:

Everything you love about Earth is gone. Except for the Last City. And now a psycho rhino named Ghaul is coming to take that away too. On September 6, it’s time to grab some big guns, unite our scattered heroes, and take back our home.

Here's what Vogt-Roberts told THR about the shift from Kong: Skull Island to Destiny 2:

Kong had finished and I was trying to figure out how to process what the last two and a half years of my life was. I’m so proud of the collaborations with Kong, but that was the quarter of a decade, essentially, so I wasn’t looking to jump into a project right away. I was sort of looking at commercials and TV stuff. This sort of randomly came up and I was joking, well I love comedy, I love sci-fi and I love video games so this is sort of a perfect combination. It only got sweeter when during my pitch I said I wanted to actually shoot it in Detroit. Luckily, Eric Hirshberg (Activision CEO) is from Michigan as well and saw that and said, ‘Alright, cool, let’s do that.’ So, the job kept getting sweeter and sweeter for me.

 

For me as a gamer, and the world is changing so much, but I just remember so vividly when I was younger marketing campaigns hadn’t figured out how to be respectful and loving to the actual people playing games in their basement before gaming was cool. Now, I think people like Activision and Sony are getting much smarter and they should be rewarded a bit for actually giving a shit about real gamers, people who made Destiny a success, logged in hundreds and hundreds of hours.

Destiny fans will certainly recognize the name-drops from Vogt-Roberts here:

I went up to Bungie, in Seattle, to play this new one and meet with the team up there — with Luke Smith (Destiny2’s game director) and the artists to sort of play around up there, sit down with them, pick their brain. It’s rare to get in the attic, in the spider webs, of somebody else’s creation. It was such a nerdy, great experience. Those guys are all such masters.

 

Nathan [Fillion] was not on set with us but he was incredibly involved. I can’t say enough good things about that guy. We had a bunch of emails going back and forth and a couple calls. He actually went and recorded video of himself riffing the speech. I was able to take the video of that to the actor who did the motion capture for Cayde-6 in the game who was there on set with us in the Cayde suit. It was a really lovely collaboration between the artist who does the mo-cap and Nathan who does the voice.

Head over to THR for more on this particular project, but here's Vogt-Roberts' comments on how the experience impacted his plans for the Metal Gear Solid movie:

I think for me there is always going to be a little bit of exploration of playing with that translation of active experience to passive experience and I think that builds into what I’m trying to achieve with Metal Gear and takes the first steps into that world of how these things can translate. Metal Gear is an infinitely tricky project and there’s a billion ways to go wrong with that. Every little experiment is ultimately going in that reservoir of knowledge of how to protect an equally important property to people.