Tsu­taya are show­ing off a list of Hideo Kojima’s 15 favorite movies that have inspired the game fran­chise. Note the inter­est­ing omis­sion of “Escape from New York”.

The Guns of Navarone
The Great Escape
Goldfin­ger
2001: A Space Odyssey
Planet of the Apes (orig­i­nal)
The Deer Hunter
Dawn of the Dead
Full Metal Jacket
Preda­tor
Die Hard
Heat
Black Hawk Down
Chil­dren of Men
Bourne Series
Casino Royale (with Daniel Craig)

Can we expect a movie adap­ta­tion in the same vein as these choices?

Hat tip to /Film

Seems like the inter­net is once again up to mis­chief, this time it revolves around “There will be blood” direc­tor, Paul Thomas Anderson.

Kotaku recently spoke with Aki Saito — the fel­low han­dling movie nego­ti­a­tions. When quizzed about Kojima’s involve­ment with the movie, he responded:

Hol­ly­wood has great respect for Mr. Kojima. They want to meet with him. Kojima will be act­ing as a pro­ducer, but we don’t know how involved he’ll be as a pro­ducer. Often Hol­ly­wood adap­ta­tions have the orig­i­nal game cre­ator involved at the begin­ning, but some­where along the line they fall out of view. This is why it’s very impor­tant for us to care­fully pick the stu­dio for this project.

Before adding that Paul Thomas Ander­son was an inter­ested direc­tor. This cir­cu­lated the world wide web like some elec­tron­i­cally fuelled wild­fire. There was some spec­u­la­tion that the much less aus­pi­cious Paul W.S. Ander­son (Alien Vs. Preda­tor) had been mis­taken for some­one with tal­ent. Luck­ily Col­lider stepped in to clarify:

I’ve emailed [movie] pro­ducer Mike De Luca and he said the rumor about Paul Thomas Ander­son is “com­pletely false and ridiculous.”

So that’s that.

Before we begin — this is a trailer for a fan made, directed and pro­duced movie “Phil­an­thropy”, it is not the offi­cial film, the pro­duc­tion qual­i­ties on this effort are far supe­rior to the major­ity of fan ded­i­ca­tions to be found on the net and this should be recog­nised. A lot of peo­ple mis­in­ter­preted the first trailer.

Now for the trailer, brought to you by MGS Phil­an­thropy:

Col­lider had the chance to meet with Michael De Luca (writer of Judge Dredd, pro­ducer on Blade II, Zathura, Ghost Rider) at ShoW­est and dis­cuss, amongst other things, the Metal Gear movie adap­ta­tion. I’ve picked out the rel­e­vant MGS related con­tent from the inter­view for you. De Luca dis­cusses the aim of the adap­ta­tion and achiev­ing an inde­pen­dent cin­e­matic aura whilst stay­ing true to the fran­chise, he also clar­i­fies his pre­vi­ous com­ment on Kurt Wim­mer — he is not direct­ing, he isn’t even hired yet — he is cur­rently involved in the adap­ta­tion writ­ing process. Though this doesn’t rule him out for a direct­ing role in the future.

Col­lider: So this is the ques­tion that every fan…I’m ask­ing this for every fan…what are you going to do to finally make a kick-ass video game movie?

Mike De Luca: I mean, hope­fully not screw it up.  For me adapt­ing a video game is just like adapt­ing a book or a play or any other…whenever you’re adapt­ing from another medium for film you try to take into account what you need to do to make it a movie. 

With books it’s how you com­pen­sate for not being inside a character’s head and with video games I think what you have to com­pen­sate for is the loss of inter­ac­tiv­ity, you know.  What makes video games fun is that you get to be the char­ac­ter and you’re sit­ting there rul­ing the uni­verse and it’s a really first per­son inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence.  When you’re in your the­atre seat, you’re stuck with these sub­jec­tive ver­sions of the story and the game from a direc­tor or the writer’s point of view.  You can’t inter­act with what’s going on so what­ever turns you on about the game, you’re imme­di­ately disadvantaged […]

So I think the bar is higher and I think in the past, peo­ple haven’t real­ized that they set the bar low for video game movies think­ing that oh, there’s a built in audi­ence and we don’t need to go crazy with this movie. […] [In Metal Gear Solid] the Cain and Able story between Solid Snake and Liq­uid Snake and their rela­tion­ship with their father and the sto­ry­line of Metal Gear Solid 4 has the mak­ings….there’s so much story in Metal Gear as opposed to other video games that I think it’s going to be a chal­lenge but it’s an upscale prob­lem to have so much the­matic sub­texts and story mate­r­ial to draw from, so I think we have a leg up already. It’s such a rich uni­verse and Kojima is like George Lucas in terms of cre­at­ing this uni­verse so what it says about war by proxy in this kind of future where war has been out­sourced to pri­vate com­pa­nies I think can be almost very top­i­cal and also kind of satir­i­cal in like a “Robo­cop” kind of way, so I think if we can get a script that hon­ors the sto­ry­line of all 4 games, but that also has a cin­e­matic aes­thetic you know the kind of aes­thetic Ver­ho­even brought to “Robo­cop” or the kind of aes­thetic the Wachowski’s brought to “The Matrix”.  If there’s a cin­e­matic iden­tity to the piece that exists on its own, it doesn’t con­flict with the DNA of the game, you know that’s our goal is to pull off those 2 things.  Not mess with the DNA of the game but pro­vide a movie that is an adap­ta­tion but that has it’s own cin­e­matic iden­tity so even if you don’t play the game you know, you’ll come out of that movie feel­ing like you did at the end of “The Matrix” or the end of “Robo­cop”.  That’s our goal anyway.

Col­lider: I guess that being said, have you thought […] $100 mil­lion movie—this is a sum­mer block­buster or this is going to be one of these mid-range kind of things?

Mike De Luca: No, they know it’s big.  I mean, we don’t want it to be crazy big but they know it’s big on the big­ger side of things.

[…] This writer Kurt Wim­mer is one of the peo­ple we’re look­ing at to talk to about pitch­ing on it.
[…] Kurt is like one of many peo­ple we’re talk­ing to about pitch­ing us back a take on adapt­ing the fran­chise. He hasn’t been hired or anything.

At the Planet Hol­ly­wood Casino in Las Vegas, as part of the pro­mo­tion for Sony’s “21”, Com­ing Soon caught up with Michael De Luca (writer of Judge Dredd, pro­ducer on Blade II, Zathura, Ghost Rider). In speak­ing with him, he revealed that now the writer’s strikes have ended, the devel­op­ment of the Metal Gear Solid movie has swung back into action.

De Luca also men­tioned an upcom­ing meet­ing with Kurt Wim­mer, direc­tor and writer of Equi­lib­rium. A num­ber of fans have pre­vi­ously expressed a desire to involve him in the game to movie adap­ta­tion — they may yet get their wish. His involve­ment isn’t yet con­firmed and we can only spec­u­late as to his poten­tial role.

A blog net­work deliv­er­ing the lat­est news updates on a range of in-production block­buster movies.

The UK pub­li­ca­tion “Nuts” (NSFW) pre­dom­i­nantly for males, has report­edly been talk­ing with Chris­t­ian Bale, so our reader Pablo tells us,

In the lat­est edi­tion of Nuts mag­a­zine ( UK ) there is an inter­view with Chris­t­ian Bale, in which he states he‘s in the run­ning to play Solid Snake in the 2009 movie Metal Gear Solid.

This is noth­ing more than a rumor at the moment, and Nuts isn’t well known for its news­wor­thi­ness. Let’s see how this one evolves.

David Hayter will have no defin­ing involve­ment in the live action metal gear solid movie adap­ta­tion. Hayter him­self, the voice of Solid Snake and screenwriter/actor, wrote a treat­ment for the film how­ever Kon­ami and the big play­ers turned it down.

Hayter has not been hired to script or pro­duce the upcom­ing fea­ture, should he have been, the film may have fol­lowed his intended direc­tion, which was, “Metal Gear as the Apoc­a­lypse Now of the dig­i­tal age, with Snake at the cen­ter of a swirling whirlpool of Genomic/military mad­ness.”

A 90% major­ity vote at IGN believe omit­ting Hayter from the pro­ceed­ings is a mis­take.  Hayter has pre­vi­ously been involved with the screen­plays of Brian Signer’s X-men and X2 and he is cer­tainly expe­ri­enced enough to do the job, cou­pled with a plen­ti­ful stash of MGS knowl­edge surely he’d be the per­fect man for the job?

Source: IGN