The narrative and highly cinematic cut-scenes are such a huge component of the popular Metal Gear Solid franchise that you'd think the series would lend itself well to a Hollywood adaptation. Unfortunately, however, it now seems that the much talked about movie project may be dead. Producer Mike De Luca recently updated the folks at Collider on the film's situation, and it's not at all encouraging at the moment.
"I don't think it's going to move forward because I got the sense that there may not be enough of a coordinated will at this point on the side of certain parties to see a movie get made," he said. "And I get it because the problem with a lot of these adaptations is it's such a huge franchise for the video game company. A movie can only hurt. If the movie's great, you're probably not going to sell more games. It's such a separate thing. The franchise being as big as it kind of helps the movie... I'm not sure the movie does the same thing for the game."
It seems like marketing strategies between the film and game industries weren't aligning on this project either. “[T]he video game companies are very protective of their property and there are certain things a studio requires freedom-wise to market and distribute a movie effectively in a global marketplace and sometimes getting those two things to match up is really hard," said De Luca. "And in the case of Metal Gear Solid, the agendas just….not because the parties weren’t amicable, it was just kind of impossible to get the agendas to match up.”
Although the project may appear dead right now, Metal Gear Solid is one of those franchises with truly global appeal, and depending on how some other big name game-based movies do in the near future, we could see Metal Gear still getting the green light for the big screen.
