Paramount confirmed a huge deal to bring the Call of Duty video game franchise to the big screen this week.
The studio, which recently closed a massive merger with Skydance, inked a deal with Microsoft-owned video game publisher Activision to turn the long-running franchise into a live action movie, with Variety reporting that the pact could extend to further movies and even TV shows to bulk up one of the best streaming services, Paramount+ – CoDCU anyone?
David Ellison, chairman and CEO of Paramount, said the deal was “a dream come true,” promising fans “a cinematic experience that honors the legacy of this one-in-a-million brand – thrilling longtime fans of Call of Duty while captivating a whole new generation.”
It sounds like the franchise is in good hands, especially with Ellison evoking one of the best Paramount+ movies, Top Gun: Maverick, in his statement, but with close to 30 games to draw inspiration from spanning everything from World War Two to the far future, exactly what the movie will look like is anyone’s guess. Speculation is rife around what the final film could end up being, but here’s the five things I think are a must for the movie.
Adapt a previous storyline
Paramount have said that the Call of Duty film adaptation will deliver “on the hallmarks of what fans love about the iconic series, while boldly expanding the franchise to entirely new audiences”.
Now, that sounds worryingly close to the tactic employed by the disappointing Assassins Creed movie to me, which got so bogged down in furthering the franchise lore, it failed to deliver on the free-running, historical fun gamers love.
Whatever direction Paramount takes with CoD, they’d be wise to pull on what’s come before, whether that’s the visceral WW2 games, the trippy Black Ops series or the action-thriller vibes of Modern Warfare. They could even create a generations-spanning mash-up of all three, something the games have touched on with the connections between Vanguard and Black Ops.
For now, nothing is confirmed with regards to the movie’s storyline, just don’t expect the infamous ‘No Russian’ mission to play out on the big screen any time soon.
Bring back the big-name cast
While Call of Duty doesn’t necessarily sell itself on featuring big name stars like Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077 or Norman Reedus in Death Stranding, it has nonetheless featured some big Hollywood names lending their voice and/or likeness to major characters in the games.
Over the years we’ve seen the likes of Josh Duhamel (Pierson, WWII), Idris Elba (Truck, Modern Warfare 3), Ice Cube (Bowman, Black Ops), Jason Statham (Waters, Call of Duty), Helena Bonham Carter (Madame Mirela, Black Ops 4: Zombies), Gary Oldman (Reznov, World at War and Black Ops) and Kit Harrington (Kotch, Infinite Warfare) all appearing in the games and it would be great to see some of these actors return, whether that’s reprising iconic roles or even in a cameo capacity. It’d be particularly exciting to see Oldman come back to a role many consider the best performance in a CoD game, but that would all depend on the timeline the film opts for.
The actor I’d most like to see return, however, is Avatar star Sam Worthington, who portrayed Black Ops’ CIA operative Alex Mason. Mason is the lead protagonist of the first instalment in the Black Ops series and goes on to remain a fairly major character throughout. As the closest thing the franchise has to a major lead, I’d be surprised if Mason isn’t included in the film in some capacity, and it’s a no-brainer to have Worthington reprise the role.
First-person chaos
The Call of Duty franchise is arguably the most iconic first-person shooter of all time and it would be great to see the film reflect that in some way.
From the beaches of Normandy to the battlefields of the future, the first-person PoV the game employs fully immerses the player in the action, sending bullets whizzing past our heads and explosions throwing us to the ground. It also adds emotional depth to the story, as we look into the eyes of a fallen comrade as they breathe their last or carry out some less than savoury actions with our own hands.
Now, I’m not expecting a Hardcore Henry-style movie entirely shot in the first-person PoV, and I definitely don’t want a Doom-like replication of the video game experience, but getting in close with the characters as the carnage unfolds is a must if Paramount want to replicate the intensity the games can offer. And if they really want to recreate the gaming experience, throw in a scene with a too-far-away shot of a wildly out of control helicopter too.
Get the right director
Ellison’s comment that Paramount is “approaching this film with the same disciplined, uncompromising commitment to excellence that guided our work on Top Gun: Maverick” certainly implies that they’re shooting for another prestige action flick, and possibly looking to fill a Mission: Impossible shaped hole.
If that’s the case, then the men behind either of those Tom Cruise hits – Joseph Kosinski and Christopher McQuarrie – would be a solid choice for the director’s chair. There’s even been rumours that before Activision signed on the dotted line with Paramount, they were courting Steven Spielberg (a known fan of the games) to helm the flick, but the sort of all encompassing deal you get with The Beard scared them off.
For me though, there’s one thing this movie needs – Bayhem. Personally, I think a Call of Duty movie needs to be exactly the sort of big, dumb fun that Michael Bay excels at. The macho military side of the Transformers franchise screams CoD, and the director has proven he has what it takes to tell a dramatic military story with the visceral 13 Hours. If the movie ends up telling a sweeping, timeline spanning story, Bay could well be the perfect man to bring that sort of epic action to life.
Zombies
This pick is probably just wishful thinking on my part, with Paramount seeming determined to deliver a more down-to-earth military tale, but almost as long as the franchise has existed, the Zombies mode has been a huge part of it.
Debuting in World at War in 2008, the Zombies mode is a ‘last stand’ type game where players must fend off hordes of undead. The hugely popular edition has been present in around a dozen of the games since, with the likes of Jeff Goldblum, Heather Graham and Kiefer Sutherland starring in the side-games. Since Black Ops Cold War in 2020, the Zombies mode has even followed a pretty intricate storyline throughout the releases, focusing around the Dark Aether dimension.
Of course, it’s unlikely the film will properly feature zombies, but it would be neat to see the mode incorporated via a dream sequence, hallucination or something similar. And maybe if the live-action iteration of the franchise does expand to streaming series’, we’ll get something akin to Marvel Zombies down the line.
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