For all the botched conversions and box office duds that the practice has produced, suddenly there’s a renewed interest among the Hollywood elite for video game adaptations. From Splinter Cell to the Michael Fassbender-led Assassin’s Creed, there’s a handful of projects that have the potential to finally bring an end to the curse that has lingered over the video game movie for well over a decade. Ubisoft isn’t the only publisher muscling its way into the action, though, as Square Enix is quietly toiling away on a Just Cause film.
As one of the most bombastic franchises in the medium, Avalanche’s chaotic open-world series is revered for it stylish set-pieces and general disregard to physics. In fact, during a recent interview with IGN, Just Cause producer Adrian Askarieh likened the nascent film to not only Just Cause 3, but also Universal’s box office juggernaut Fast and Furious.
“Just Cause 3 has a terrific story,” Askarieh told IGN. “It has Rico going back to Medici, the place of his birth and then subsequent displacement, and the murder of his family. And he goes back there to do what he does best which is to discombobulate regimes. And in terms of action, I think Just Cause has just as much right to be called an action movie as The Fast and Furious. They’re both outlandish.”
One factor that is lingering over a potential start date for the Just Cause film is the performance of Aleksander Bach’s Hitman: Agent 47 – the Hitman IP is also published by Square – which has taken in just north of $60 million off the back of a $35 million budget. Hardly the biggest profit margin, of course, and Askarieh is cognizant of the fact that the better Agent 47 performs, the easier it will be to get a green light on the long-rumored Just Cause film.
Just Cause 3 is the next entry in Avalanche’s outlandish series. It’ll launch on December 1 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.