Duncan Jones’ Warcraft: The Beginning and Assassin’s Creed not only stand tall as two of the biggest releases of 2016, but they’re also among the most high-profile video game adaptations in film history, sparking a resurgence in the game-to-movies practice that has already birthed renditions of Splinter Cell and the Alicia Vikander-fronted Tomb Raider.
Beyond that, though, two video game adaptations that continue to simmer on the brink of development can be traced back to developer Naughty Dog. Held up as cinematic masterpieces, over the years there has been mooted talk of both Uncharted and The Last of Us gracing the silver screen, and despite both projects displaying early signs of promise – Mark Wahlberg was attached to the former; Game of Thrones starlet Maisie Williams circled the latter – both films have effectively been placed on ice.
Don’t expect that to change anytime soon, either, after Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann told The Frame that Uncharted and The Last of Us continue to truck along at a glacial pace. When quizzed on the latter, Druckmann stated that “I have been a writer on it. But right now it hasn’t moved anywhere in the past couple years.”
As for when we’ll see Nathan Drake light up the big screen, the dev revealed that “the Uncharted film has been in development now for I think nine years so we’ve learned these things happen at their own time, very slowly.”
So, there you have it; Uncharted and The Last of Us, Naughty Dog’s two crown jewels, continue to languish in development, and there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon.