On paper, adapting the video game Uncharted: Drake's Fortune to the big screen looks like a no-brainer. In the character of Nate Drake, you essentially have a young Indiana Jones, who escapes a creative array of baddies and one tight scrape after another while tracking down the golden statue of El Dorado. So why can't Hollywood get this baby on the screen?
Variety reports that Limitless director Neil Burger — who took the helm of the movie last year after David O. Russell (The Fighter) left the project — has departed as well. Instead of bringing a new director on board, Dark Knight franchise producer Charles Roven's Atlas Entertainment and Spider-Man producer Avid Arad'sArad Productions have hired Marianne and Cormac Wibberley to rewrite the script. Once they have that in hand, they plan to hire a director.
The Wibberleys wrote the crowd-pleasing National Treasure movies and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, but the groaning you hear out there is coming from some of the game's incredibly passionate fans who are looking over the screenwriting team's other credits and deciding that they don't like what they see. Much of the wincing is over G-Force, a cutesy movie the Wibberleys wrote about a special forces team of guinea pigs.
The fans of Uncharted do not want cutesy. They even bristled when Russell was talking about incorporating a "family dynamic" into his adaptation. (That said, I really wanted to see Russell make this movie. He proved with The Fighter that he can make an thrilling movie with fully fleshed characters.)
The fans of Uncharted want to see the game's off-the-hook stunt pieces recreated on the screen with the taut, storytelling of the Bourne movies. Oh yeah, and they really seem to want Castle star Nathan Fillion to play the role of Drake.
Is that such a difficult challenge?
[Variety]
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