Remember that Gears of War movie Netflix was working on? Nobody would blame you if you didn’t. The streaming service and purveyor of aggressively mediocre action flicks nabbed the film rights for Microsoft’s cover-shooter series way back in November 2022. The plan was to lead with a feature film and then segue into an animated series, but little has been heard about the project since the rights acquisition.
Now though, the project might finally have a director. According to the Hollywood Reporter, David Leitch is in negotiations to helm the project, though the deal has not yet been signed off with the traditional chainsaw duel.
Leitch has had an interesting career. He was originally a stuntman, working on films like Blade, The Matrix sequels Reloaded and Revolutions, and Zack Snyder’s 300. In 2014, he codirected John Wick with Chad Stahelski, though he was only credited as a producer. He got his directorial debut with 2017’s Atomic Blonde, going on to direct Deadpool 2 and 2022 action film Bullet Train. His most recent project was action romcom The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.
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In short, he seems like an ideal pick to adapt a game as explosively grand, outwardly serious and inwardly daft as Gears of War. Leitch will apparently produce the film with his business partner Kelly McCormick. Perhaps the most interesting person currently attached to the film, however, is writer Jon Spaights, who wrote the screenplays for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies. Granted, he was also involved in the stories for Prometheus and that terrible The Mummy reboot starring Tom Cruise, but no Gears of War film would be complete without some preposterous nonsense, so that’s alright.
At this point, I’d be happy to see more Gears of War in any shape or form. It’s been six years since Gears 5, which I think is a slightly underrated entry in the series, balancing classic grub scratching with some light and breezy open-world exploration. But The Coalition is going backwards in time for its next game, the prequel Gears of War: E-Day was announced in June last year. We haven’t heard much about it since, but I reckon it’ll feature prominently in Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase next month.
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