Kingdom Come: Deliverance Is Becoming A Movie — And It’s Got The Ideal Person Behind It
Don’t expect any orcs or elves, but quite a few swordfights.
As early as 1986’s Dragon Quest, high fantasy and medieval settings have been one of the most popular approaches to role-playing video games. It’s a well-worn genre across all mediums, and it makes sense that for a class of games as dependent on immersion as RPGs, players would want to explore worlds that are either fantastical and impossible or so rooted in the past as to be totally unrecognizable to modern audiences. However, some developers take that idea to granular extremes, finding ways to make the experience of a medieval setting grounded and historically accurate to a remarkable degree — and easily the most popular games to do this recently are the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series.
Released back in 2018, the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a first-person action RPG that stood out from the rest specifically because of its hardline approach to realism and authenticity, although the game’s interpretation of those concepts garnered a fair share of controversy as well. As a result of the acclaim, a sequel was released last year, and now the creative director of the games, Daniel Vávra, is bringing that conception of historical fidelity to the big screen.
With maybe a few less hours of horseback riding.
While being interviewed by Czech website CzechCrunch recently, the CEO of game development company Warhorse Studios Martin Frývaldský revealed that Vávra was in the process of developing a film based on the games. Frývaldský also mentioned that a draft of the film already existed, and claimed that negotiations were currently underway. Considering Hollywood’s longtime love affair with ancient historical spectacle, it makes sense that such a successful franchise would be on their radar. But also with that consideration comes a question of how exactly Kingdom Come can set itself apart from its contemporaries and predecessors.
Set in the early 15th century in the Kingdom of Bohemia (predecessor state to the Czech Republic and then currently under the rule of the Holy Roman Empire), the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance follows a young blacksmithing apprentice named Henry whose modest aspirations are upended when his family is slaughtered and his town is pillaged by Cuman soldiers against the backdrop of Sigismund of Luxembourg’s real-life campaign to depose his half-brother Wenceslaus IV, the then King of Bohemia. What starts out as Henry’s quest for revenge against the murderers of his parents eventually spirals into a much larger conflict that, against all expectations, will inevitably determine the course of much of Central and Western European history.
An adaptation of Kingdom Come could be one of the most honest depictions of medieval warfare we’ve seen on-screen.
With the popularity of shows like Game of Thrones and its successive spinoffs, it’s clear that audiences have a large appetite for high-fantasy based on a certain degree of real-world historical influence; it makes the genre a bit more tangible. But the alternative, straight historical drama, has been more inconsistent — shows like The Tudors and Vikings were undoubtable successes, but many and more have been short-lived.
Even though it may be based on a more obscure slice of medieval history, Kingdom Come: Deliverance has the opportunity to introduce audiences accustomed to high-fantasy and straight fiction to an ensemble of genuine historical figures all involved in a complex game of cutthroat political maneuvering, like the one for the Iron Throne but instead for control of the Holy Roman Empire. Couple that with the kind of gritty and weighty sword-based combat that made the KCD games such a hit and you could potentially have something that rivals the cultural dominance of the ASOIAF adaptations, while also being based on an incredibly dramatic patchwork of larger-than-life history that both deconstructs and reaffirms the epic chivalric wish-fulfillment that defines so many Hollywood interpretations of the era.
