Sony's Helldivers Movie Just Got An Unexpected New Lead
The forces of Super Earth will be led by TV's most popular lawbringing drifter.
In becoming the century’s most popular (and profitable) artistic medium, video games have created countless expansive worlds of science fiction, some comparable to the worldbuilding in the famous sci-fi of film, television, and literature. Games like Halo and Mass Effect are among the best known for a reason: they both have intricate narratives about human nature projected hundreds of years into the future, allowing for fascinating speculation about where we might go and what sort of existential threats might wait for us in the stars.
Now that Hollywood is in the honeymoon phase with modern video game adaptations (look no further than the opening-weekend success of Resident Evil), it’s only a matter of time before those great works of interactive sci-fi come to the big screen. Halo already had a two-season TV show, and there’s currently a Mass Effect show in development at Amazon. But there’s another, far more recent piece of video game sci-fi about to burst onto the big screen, and it stars an actor that television audiences are very well acquainted with.
In just two games, the Helldivers franchise has become one of the best sci-fi satires in gaming.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Alan Ritchson, star of Reacher and Netflix’s War Machine, is in talks to play the lead in Sony’s upcoming live-action Helldivers film. Directed by Fast and Furious alumnus Justin Lin, the movie was originally set to star Jason Momoa before the actor dropped out for unknown reasons.
Helldivers, like the Warhammer 40K franchise, is an example of grimdark science fiction, a subgenre that revels in envisioning the worst-case scenario for humanity’s future, often the apocalyptic culmination of all of our worst behaviors and repeated mistakes. In the case of Helldivers, that future takes the form of Super Earth, a totalitarian galactic dictatorship (masquerading as “managed democracy”) that values military power above all else, with its elite forces (the title Helldivers) waging a prolonged conflict against three enemy factions: insectoid alien creatures known as the Bugs, cybernetically-enhanced human rebels known as the Cyborgs, and a squid-like race of beings known as the Illuminate.
Unlike the Starship Troopers franchise that inspired it, there are more threats in Helldivers than just alien bugs.
It’s unlikely Momoa was cast as anyone other than an elite Helldiver, and Alan Ritchson is a great replacement, having just recently played a staff sergeant facing off against an insurmountable extraterrestrial threat in War Machine. If there’s anyone other than Jason Momoa who can embody the kind of hyper-macho jarhead archetype the game is riffing on, it’s him. It’s remarkable that there’s already a film on the way for a franchise that only debuted 11 years ago, and fans won’t have to wait too long to see Super Earth’s conquest of the stars jump from consoles and into movie theaters.
