Incoming friendly fire: director Justin Lin is diving into Helldivers

Justin Lin adds an adaptation of Helldivers to his growing list of upcoming projects.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  December 1, 2025 | 8:05pm
Screenshot: YouTube
Film News Helldivers
Incoming friendly fire: director Justin Lin is diving into Helldivers

After pulling over to the side of the road and getting out of Dom Toretto’s Dodge Charger, Justin Lin, the director who made those Fast & Furious movies a bombastic delight, is going to hell… divers. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Lin’s next movie will be an adaptation of the Helldivers video games for Sony. The games are a bit like Starship Troopers in that they’re fascist satires in which the main characters are the baddies. Players are members of an elite squadron of shocktroops (Helldivers), who defend an authoritarian government from various invaders, including bugs, cyborgs, and squid monsters. Like Starship Troopers, the Helldivers are disposable footsoldiers tossed into the meatgrinder by a government that barely pretends to care about them. (Meanwhile, Neill Blomkamp is making a “faithful” adaptation of Starship Troopers, which is less satirically fascist, more sincerely fascist, and sounds like a bad idea.)

Though the games are massively popular online, with 2024’s Helldivers 2 selling more than 19 million copies as of October 2025, the games entered the national discourse via, and we’re sorry to bring this up, the Charlie Kirk assassination. One of the messages scrawled on the killer’s bullets included the arrow sequence for a Helldivers 2 combo, which only made the game’s messaging more confusing.

Since realizing life’s too short to spend it wrangling Vin Diesel on set, Lin directed the considerably smaller Last Days this year. Based on a true story, Last Days (not to be confused with Gus Van Sant’s Kurt Cobain fanfic of the same name) follows a young missionary who plans to convert a small, isolated tribe, and the government that aims to stop him. Lin has also signed on to several big-budget projects, including an adaptation of One-Punch Man and Brzrkr, based on a comic by Keanu Reeves and Matt Kindt. But Lin is also the type of director who has an “announced film projects” subcategory on his Wikipedia page, so we’ll see whether any of these movies make it to screens before Stakehorse or Two For The Money, which reportedly stars Charlize Theron and Daniel Craig.

 
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