8 months later, on 8th Feb­ru­ary 2007 Vari­ety reported that Colum­bia Pic­tures, owned by Sony Pic­tures Enter­tain­ment were “bring­ing hit vidgame fran­chise “Metal Gear Solid” to the bigscreen.”

With the announce­ment came the news of Michael De Luca’s inolv­ment as a pro­ducer — pre­vi­ous works have included Amer­i­can His­tory X, Blade II and Mag­no­lia. Video game cre­ator Hideo Kojima will act as exec­u­tive pro­ducer, over­see­ing the project.

Yair Lan­dau, Sony chair, con­firmed it was in the works fol­low­ing his keynote speech Thurs­day at the DICE vidgame con­fab in Las Vegas — to quote, “It’s a very cin­e­matic game, it really lends itself to movie telling. But the ques­tion is, ‘How do you trans­late Snake’s expe­ri­ence into a full arc that con­forms to what audi­ences expect on the large screen?”

Doug Bel­grad, an exec­u­tive involved with final­is­ing the deal (the other being Sam Dick­er­man) states that MGS is “loaded with well-developed, intrigu­ing char­ac­ters and one of the first games to ever use cin­e­matic tools in its sto­ry­telling.” The deal is sup­pos­edly near completion.

As it stands, the IMDB page pens a 2009 release date.