Gears of War Movie an Origin Story?

Published by Jeff Leins on: December 10th, 2009

In June 2008, New Line Cinema officially announced Len Wiseman (Underworld, Die Hard 4) as their director pick for a Gears of War movie scheduled for 2010.  The news came on the heels of the wildly popular video game by Epic Games, which produced a second in November 2008 that sold two million copies on its release weekend.

The trick for the movie, like most video game adaptations, is to find a story worth telling amidst the slick gameplay, rich alien world, and grenade explosions.  Events in the first game unfold on the fictional planet of Sera, where humans battle an underground race called the Locust, and the second picks up six months later.  Wiseman suggested in January this could even become a trilogy of sorts, a sci-fi Lord of the Rings style epic.

Championing the game-to-movie project from the beginning has been producer Wyck Godfrey, who also worked behind the scenes on the record-breaking Twilight Saga: New Moon.  Here’s what Godfrey had to say recently in an interview with Making Of, revealing details about where the plot is headed:

The hard part is how to make it into something that doesn’t feel like a world torn asunder and people just in battle. I think we really want to focus on the idea of a world that’s running well, and then it’s Emergence Day and kind of make it impactful and immediate and the survival of those 48 hours as people survive Emergence Day. It’s more like Cloverfield or something like that. Because trying to tell the epic story of an alien planet that’s living in a horrific environment just feels like the wrong mood right now.

Luckily the movie won’t retread the story of the games, but potentially kick off before the Locust battle began.  Wiseman will need to strike the right gritty visuals though if this is going to work (I’m envisioning Children of Men-inspired action), and the script will need more than one-dimensional military types.