Sony’s Uncharted is back on track. Production was shut down due to Coronavirus earlier this year, though they’re back on set now and to mark the occasion, star Tom Holland has shared a picture (seen below) of his chair, which reads ‘Nate.’ This is what hero Nathan Drake is called by his friends and is proof that this long in development video game adaptation is actually going to happen.
Seeing something concrete from Uncharted is welcome, as the film has been in various stages of development hell since its announcement 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 now, hopefully finally, Zombieland and Venom‘s Ruben Fleischer. As a measure of how much time has passed since they began planning Uncharted, Mark Wahlberg was once cast as go-getting adventurer Nathan Drake. Now, he’s playing curmudgeonly middle-aged sidekick Victor Sullivan.
Despite the reassuring news that Uncharted is back on track, I’m still skeptical of whether it needs to be a movie. First and foremost, Naughty Dog’s video games already function well as movies, made all the more compelling by being interactive. Secondly, the games are effectively an Indiana Jones pastiche and those films still exist. Finally, unless they’re starting a whole new timeline, we’ve already seen the story of a ‘young’ Nathan Drake at length in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.
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. While I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced that an Uncharted movie is necessary, I’ll give it a fair shake as long as it’s entertaining. Let’s hope we get to see some more pictures from the set so we can get an idea of the direction they’re heading in.
Uncharted is scheduled for release on July 16th, 2021.