After almost a decade's worth of titles in the action-adventure video game franchise, the live-action movie adaptation of Uncharted got a big push forward today with the announcement that Shawn Levy is set as director. The series, which just released its fourth main game earlier this year with Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, centers on famed explorer and treasure hunter Nathan "Nate" Drake as he travels the world to gather historical artifacts, solve puzzles, and shoot metric tons of bad guys.
Deadline reports that Levy will take the helm for the Sony Pictures movie. Joe Carnahan has turned in the most recent draft of the script and will now move from the director's chair on this project to the studio's Bad Boys for Life project. That high-profile picture will reunite Will Smith and Martin Lawrence; no casting announcements have been made for Uncharted at this point. The highly anticipated picture will be an Arad/Atlas Entertainment Production, with Charles Roven, Avi Arad, Alex Gartner, and Ari Arad producing.
Levy, who will be participating in a very interesting Q&A during our IMAX screening of his film Real Steel, has been quite busy as a producer lately, but Uncharted will be his first feature directorial responsibility since 2014's Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. That family-friendly action-comedy franchise feels like a good place to start to get an idea of what Levy's version of Uncharted might look like. Despite Drake killing boatloads of people, the games have an ESRB rating of T for teens, so Sony and Levy should be happy working within the generous arena of a PG-13 rating. On the plus side, the games have a fantastic mythology built on both character relationships as well as puzzle-solving and historical narratives.
At the moment, we're not sure just which story the movie adaptation will follow, if it will directly adapt the games, or if it will forge its own trailblazing path. If the movie sticks to the plot of the games, starting with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune--which would make sense since it's an origin story of sorts--audiences would see Drake looking for the lost treasure of El Dorado. Start your fan-casting now for Drake, journalist Elena Fisher, and the tough-as-nails Victor "Sully" Sullivan!
Watch the trailer for the latest Uncharted game to get an idea of what moviegoers will be in store for:
