Not much has surfaced about Activision Blizzard Studios’ Call of Duty film since Sicario 2: Soldado’s director, Stefano Sollima, was tapped to helm the project in 2018. The latest update doesn’t bring good tidings, either. Apparently, Activision has placed the film on hold indefinitely, since it no longer counts as an “industrial priority.” As such, the project currently resides in limbo; not even Sollima is clear on whether things may change.
Sollima shared these few details on a podcast with Italian website badtaste.it. The site relayed word of the Call of Duty update in a news post. According to Sollima’s brief note on the matter, loosely translated via Google, Scott Silver, the scribe behind last year’s Joker, penned the Call of Duty film’s script. However, Activision’s plan to expand the CoD universe beyond games has since lapsed, and no longer represents an “industrial priority” for the company. Consequently, the movie itself sits at a standstill.
The director acknowledged that such stopgaps are common in the American film industry. For now, though, his attachment to the project going forward remains in limbo.
Concrete details concerning Call of Duty’s cinematic adaptation never surfaced, though Activision was reportedly adamant about it not adapting preexisting stories. Sollima himself once said his vision would “betray the [vide game] structure” in order to make a good film based on the medium. In an interview with SlashFilm in 2018, he teased a desire to “tell a story of a solider,” which, according to him, would be different from typical war movies. Maybe one day Sollima will get to realize his idea for Call of Duty on the big screen. It’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, however.
In gaming, of course, Activision’s prized military shooter couldn’t have a better presence. In addition to charting on best-seller lists month after month, the series reigned supreme throughout the 2010s, appearing on the decade’s top 10 best-selling games list a total of seven times.
[Source: badtaste.it via ComicBook.com]
