Most of the time when a video game is going the film route and hits a wall during production it’s usually stalled for good. Sure, there are some rare exceptions at times such as the Doom movie lingering in development for nearly a decade before it finally hit theaters, but even when a video game movie has attached star power, such as Bruce Willis and Jamie Foxx in Kane & Lynch, production can be shuttered for good.
After being hyped and having a director attached, the film adaptation of the hit Xbox 360 game Gears of War seemingly fell down a deep hole that was almost too deep even for Locust hordes to come out of. Announced in 2007, the Gears flick received a suitable amount of hype since the action and tone of the games would make for a good action blockbuster - battlefield bro moments and all.
It may have seemed like the Gears movie was simply the latest lost cause on the video game movie front, but the project has been revived more or less. According to Variety, a new Gears script is being shopped around to Hollywood studios after New Line Cinema, a subsidiary of Warner Bros., dropped the project. It may not sound encouraging that New Line dropped the Gears movie, but such a thing is mostly because the project was simply going nowhere, at least in their hands, after Len Weisman (Die Hard 4) pulled out to due other endeavours..
No major production advances have been made on the Gears movie, though a script written by Hollywood’s go to action man Stuart Beattie (Pirates of the Caribbean 4) is being shopped to entice a potential suitor. It’s worth noting that Beattie also wrote a version of the ill-fated Halo movie so he knows his way around video game properties and penning dumb action, as evident by his turn adapting G.I. Joe into a movie.
There’s no word as to what the most recent Gears script involves and if Epic Games has any hand in the project. The core Gears franchise may be done as of now, but things are far from coming to a close based on the forthcoming Gears of War: Judgment. The fourth entry in the series and the potential of a next-gen arrival makes it clear that Epic still has major plans for the franchise. But whether or not a major live-action movie plays a part in those plans is still a question we may not learn about any time soon.
I’m far from being the biggest fan of the Gears franchise, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the COG soldiers come to life since it could provide some decent sci-fi action. Sure, Gears is built upon a ton of genre tropes and seems like the best movie Michael Bay never made, and in a way it seem pointless to adapt into a movie since the games deliver so much. But to be honest I think if pulled off the right way a Gears movie could become one of the better video game movie based efforts released unless the entire cast comprises of former WWE wrestlers.
