Sony Pictures’ Uncharted is on track for a February 2022 release after a protracted and painful development process. The globetrotting shoot was bedevilled by COVID-19, with the film forced to take a four-month break during the first lockdown. Then, once they’d returned to work, the team hit another snag when star Antonio Banderas tested positive for the virus.
Now that post-production is underway, though, things should go more smoothly. We’ve already seen some images from the movie and today we have a fresh look courtesy of a New York Times article exploring Hollywood’s attempts at adapting video games to the screen. The image shows Tom Holland as the heroic Nathan Drake, with Mark Wahlberg as his grizzled buddy Sully.
Check it out in the gallery below:
It’ll be a relief when Uncharted hits theaters, as even beyond COVID-19 it’s faced a bumpy road since it was unveiled way back in 2008. Over that time, the following have been officially announced as director: *deep breath* David O. Russell, Neil Burger, Seth Gordon, Shawn Levy, Dan Trachtenberg, Travis Knight and, finally, Zombieland and Venom‘s Ruben Fleischer. As a measure of how much time has passed since they began planning this, Wahlberg was once cast as go-getting adventurer Nathan Drake. Now, however, he’s playing curmudgeonly middle-aged sidekick Victor Sullivan.
But many remain skeptical of whether there needs to be an Uncharted movie at all. After all, Naughty Dog’s video games are effectively an Indiana Jones pastiche and the series has already ended with no further sequels in sight. Also, unless they’re starting a whole new timeline, we saw Nathan Drake’s backstory at length in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. And then there are lingering questions over casting Holland as Drake, not least from the actor himself.
But hey, there’s enough fuel in the Uncharted concept to make a swashbuckling adventure with a bunch of pretty scenery and some cool action sequences, so I’ll give it a fair shake.