Sony’s gonna make that Uncharted movie. That’s not up for debate. The only question was, when it would happen. We first heard about the movie—a prequel to the popular PlayStation adventure game series—around 2014. In 2017, it seemed the studio had its eyes set on Tom Holland, their newly minted Spider-Man, to play a young Nathan Drake. Then we heard nothing for a while. Seasons changed, people changed. Now finally, the Uncharted movie has a release date: December 18, 2020. Yes, Christmas is for adventurin’.
The news comes to us from The Hollywood Reporter, which also shared a few other release dates, including an April 3, 2020 release for Kevin Hart’s Fatherhood and February 5, 2021 for a new Cinderella starring pop star Camila Cabello.
The Uncharted movie has gone through a few different creative forces, including director Shawn Levy and screenwriter-director Joe Carnahan. 10 Cloverfield Lane and Black Mirror director Dan Trachtenberg is currently the director, with a script from Jonathan Rosenberg and Mark Walker. There’s no reason you should know their names, but that’s the current draft Sony’s working with. Its Christmas 2020 release puts it up against Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, which I suppose means Sony’s pretty confident they can capture the “musicals are stupid” crowd in a year with no Star Wars movie and no announced superhero movie.
Holland is an interesting choice for Nathan Drake. In the games, Drake is a hard-living 30-something adventurer who raids tombs and lost arks alike. He finds treasures and ancient artifacts but usually runs afoul of mercenaries, terrorists, and supernatural curses. It happens a lot. By casting Holland, Sony is forced to give us a Drake origin story, which came into play as flashbacks in both Uncharted 3 and Uncharted 4. One can assume, then, that this movie will focus on a young Drake’s early grifting days and perhaps his first encounter with treasure and death-defying parkour. Some might even call him Peter Parkour. But I wouldn’t.
Uncharted is a truly beloved franchise that made game developer Naughty Dog the toast of console gamers everywhere. They’re some of the most frenetic, exciting games ever made, but they also utilize a very strong storyline. Hopefully Trachtenberg and company can capture some of what makes those games so engaging—it’s all about the characters—and not just give us another watered down video game movie.
Images: Sony/Naughty Dog
Kyle Anderson is the Editor at Large for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
