The track record of the video game movie took another hit last month with “Assassin’s Creed,” an expensive flop, that neither fans of the button masher nor critics particularly cared for, but Ubisoft is keeping hope alive. The company is pressing on with plans for “Splinter Cell,” and I suppose if you have Tom Hardy attached to something, you do what you can to make it. But how will it avoid the pitfalls of the previous movies in the genre that have come before? That was the question Collider put to “John Wick: Chapter 2” producer Basil Iwanyk, who explained how the approach might see them avoid the kind of mistakes we’ve come to associate with this kind of territory.
“… the challenge of making ‘Splinter Cell’ interesting was we didn’t have this IP with a very specific backstory. That allowed us to make up our own world and really augment and fill out the characters. I don’t think one applies to the other because I don’t think our movie will feel like a movie that came out of a video game, I think it’ll feel like a badass, Tom Hardy action movie, which is what we wanted,” he said.
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Iwanyk says that a script is now in hand, and the challenge now is to cut some pages (it’s too long), and hopefully get Hardy’s approval, and then start really moving ahead. And the plan is to make something gritty, but also distinct.
“…we’re definitely going to make it a hard PG-13. No, it’s not going to be like [John] Wick,’ but it’s going to be badass,” he said. “The good and the bad news is that, obviously, the Bond movies have had a resurgence and the Jason Bourne movies are the Jason Bourne movies, so we’re trying to stay away from those movies in terms of tone, in terms of bad guys, in terms of settings. What’s a world that we haven’t seen yet? What’s an area of the world and a conflict that we haven’t really touched upon in movies in a long time, to make it feel fresh?”
So, some big questions to get figured out but it sounds like they’re taking their time to get it right. Can “Splinter Cell” starring Tom Hardy break the video game movie curse? Let us know in the comments section.