New Regency and Ubisoft Motion Pictures are still committed to bringing Splinter Cell to the big screen, and Deadline reports today that the studios have brought Frank John Hughes on board to write a new script for the military-action thriller, which Edge of Tomorrow‘s Doug Liman is still attached to direct.
A hotter-than-ever Tom Hardy, riding a wave of critical adoration after Mad Max: Fury Road, is still in line to star as Sam Fisher, a highly trained special operative in a fictional black-ops sub-division known as Echelon. Along with his fellow Echelon agents, Fisher tackles dangerous terrorist threats with an array of combat skills, high-tech gadgets and ingenuity.
Hughes is best known as an actor, having appeared in The Sopranos and 24, but he recently adapted sci-fi Shovel Ready for Warner Bros. He’s the latest in a significant string of scribes to take a crack at Splinter Cell, which was already one of Ubisoft’s most popular video game franchises – Eric Warren Singer (American Hustle) and Sheldon Turner (Up in the Air) wrote previous versions of the script.
Hardy recently stated that he’s still gung-ho about the project and has been pushing to get things moving, and with Hughes now writing the script, hopefully the film can take some significant steps forward sooner rather than later. Video game adaptations are definitely coming back in full force, with Justin Kurzel directing Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in an Assassin’s Creed adaptation set for next fall, so the time may finally be right for Sam Fisher to leave his bootprint on the big screen in a Splinter Cell franchise.