Between recent attempts like Assassin's Creed and Hitman: Agent 47, video game movies have a lousy track record in Hollywood. Ranging from okay to downright bad, there has arguably never been a genuinely great recreation of an interactive story. Now Kong: Skull Island's Jordan Vogt-Roberts seems intent on changing that with an adaptation of Metal Gear Solid, and the project has just taken an enormous step forward by locking down the director's recent collaborator Derek Connolly to write the script.
Variety reports that Jordan Vogt-Roberts' Metal Gear Solid adaptation reunited the director with Derek Connolly as the film's scribe. The duo recently worked together on Kong: Skull Island and Connolly has also become known for his work on Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World. Connolly clearly has quite a bit of experience dealing in stories that revolve around human heroes facing off against enormous monsters, so telling a story about a giant, walking tank with nuclear capabilities should not be too much of a stretch.
Fans of the Metal Gear Solid franchise already know that Derek Connolly has a massive undertaking ahead of him in the creation of this script. The Metal Gear mythology is one of the densest in the entire pantheon of video game stories, and it is arguably impossible to fit everything from a single game into a single movie. Jordan Vogt-Roberts has already stated that the film won't be a direct adaptation of any one game, which means Connolly now has to dive into the world of Solid Snake and Big Boss in order to figure out a version of the story that sets up all of the essentials while remaining true to the source material.
For those of you who are less familiar with the Metal Gear Solid mythology, the first game in the series centers on a badass super soldier name Solid Snake who sneaks into an Alaskan military base when a rogue special forces unit called FOXHOUND takes it over. Once inside the facility, Snake learns that FOXHOUND has obtained a nuclear-equipped tank called Metal Gear REX, and plans to hold the world hostage until its demands are met. The game's mythology has spun out across numerous sequels and prequels, but that 1998 game is the starting point for many fans of the series. Now it's just a matter of waiting to see how Derek Connolly manipulates that core story to actually make an MGS movie work.
CinemaBlend will keep you posted with more developments related to the Metal Gear Solid film adaptation as more information becomes available to us. For now, check out our 2017 movie premiere guide and our 2018 movie premiere guide to see what's set to hit the big screen over the next year.
