Activision Planning Multi-Part Film Series Set in the Call of Duty Universe
Activision’s massively popular military first-person shooter Call of Duty is heading to the big screen, not just as a single blockbuster effort but as several films in a series that takes cues from Marvel‘s contained movie-verse setup. Many of Hollywood’s producers are knocking at the doors of game studios to pitch ideas about adapting their video game titles such as We Happy Few, Sleeping Dogs and Tomb Raider, but Call of Duty’s transition to the big screen, much like Marvel’s, will be produced by an in-house production studio so that it gets adapted properly.
The Call of Duty movies will be the first movie project under the Activision Blizzard Studios production company and will also act as the distributor. The company was built on November 2015, specifically to adapt the various properties held by its parent Activision Blizzard into movies and television series. Currently, the studio produces Skylanders Academy TV series which is distributed on NetFlix.
At the helm of Activision Blizzard Studios are co-presidents Stacey Sher and Nick Van Dyk. Sher is a movie industry veteran and has been a producer of various award-winning movies since the early ’90s including Pulp Fiction (1994), Django Unchained (2012) and more. Van Dyk on the other hand was VP of corporate strategy and business development at Disney for close to a decade and played a significant role in Disney’s acquisition of Pixar, Marvel and LucasFilms.
According to Sher, they have already plotted out “many years” down the line and much work has been done already in terms of generating scripts, research and mapping out the entire Call of Duty series. They do not intend to directly transpose any of the previous game’s existing plot but draw from the ‘feel’ of each previous title and adapt them independently.
“It’s going to have the same sort of high-adrenaline, high-energy aesthetic as the game, but it’s not a literal adaptation. It’s a much more broad and inclusive, global in scope … a big, tentpole Marvel-esque movie.” adds Van dyk.
