Battlefield Is Getting A Movie Adaptation From Two Action Icons
The Battlefield/Call of Duty conflict is about to take over theaters.
Despite the overabundance of the first-person shooter in the modern video game landscape, it's kind of impossible to imagine the industry without it. Games like Wolfenstein 3D, the original Doom, and Goldeneye 64 didn't just provide players with countless hours of fond, blood-soaked memories; they also laid the groundwork for every game in the genre that would come after them while pushing forward technological advancements across the entire gaming industry. It's easy to look at them today and see a bunch of unoriginal clones, but there was a time when FPS games were at the cutting edge of the medium.
Nowadays, the most widely recognized and financially successful examples of the genre are Activision’s Call of Duty and EA’s Battlefield series, both of which are immensely successful military franchises that depict wars both real and fictional in the past, present, and future across dozens of games. Since both series debuted (Battlefield in 2002 and Call of Duty in 2003) they’ve been longstanding industry rivals, both responding to and subverting trends inspired by each other, and now that rivalry is about to evolve on the big screen. Just a week after a release date was announced for Paramount Pictures and Microsoft’s upcoming Call of Duty film adaptation, the Battlefield franchise responded with an announcement of its own.
Last year’s Battlefield 6 marked the first time the franchise overtook a Call of Duty release in sales. Will the movie replicate that success?
According to The Hollywood Reporter, multiple studios are currently taking part in a fresh bidding war over a potential adaptation of the Battlefield franchise, directed by Mission: Impossible’s own Christopher McQuarrie and produced by and potentially starring Michael B. Jordan. As of right now the project has been pitched to several studios already, including Apple and Sony, with a specific emphasis on a theatrical release, which would make perfect sense considering the kind of theatrical scale McQuarrie has championed with the M:I franchise as well as the importance of the theatrical experience on the success of last year’s Sinners, which snagged Jordan his first Oscar.
Despite the first game taking place in World War II (the year 1942 to be exact), the Battlefield series has gone all over the map as well as across time. There are multiple period piece games taking place during the Vietnam War, as well as both World Wars, and there are also multiple installments that take place in either the near or far-flung future. One of the games, Battlefield Hardline, focuses specifically on Miami police with an emphasis on urban crime and policing in a “cops and robbers” style-narrative, which is ironic considering Jordan is also actively working on a reboot of Miami Vice along with Austin Butler.
Since Battlefield 1942’s release back in 2002, the series has depicted both real and imagined warfare across multiple decades.
Much like Call of Duty, the focus in the Battlefield games has always been more about immersive wartime combat and multiplayer cooperation as opposed to the single-player campaign narrative, which means that an adaptation will more than likely be building an original story from the ground up. There’s also the fact that first-person shooters are frequently at odds with the thematic nature of most war films; video games want to present war as exhilarating, whereas cinematic depictions of war tend to do the opposite.
There’s no way of knowing right now what approach McQuarrie and Jordan will take, especially considering how versatile the games in the franchise have been, but it’ll certainly be interesting to see the duo figure out how to bring the identity of the games to the screen without becoming a generic military blockbuster.
