When it comes to Bad Ideas That People Have Spent An Enormous Amount Of Time And Money On Over The Years (Non-“Getting A Lot Of People Killed” Division), it’s hard to think of a stronger contender than Hollywood’s multi-decade attempts to get a Metal Gear Solid movie off the ground. Next month marks the literal 20th anniversary of game creator Hideo Kojima first making claims that a Hollywood version of his hyper-convoluted spy story was in the works, a two-decade span that has seen a lot of news stories go flying—hi, Oscar Isaac; bye, Oscar Isaac—and not one second of actual film.
Now, as if to mark the milestone, THR reports that Final Destination: Bloodlines directing duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein have just been tossed at Sony’s dreams of one day actually making a movie about taciturn badass Solid Snake and his various clone brothers/daddy/babies. Sony just signed the pair—who originally met as contestants on Steven Spielberg’s failed Fox reality series On The Lot, a fact we would rate as “annoyingly distracting”—for a big, expensive first-look deal, and the first thing they’ll be looking at is the Metal Gear Solid movie. (In addition to projects they already had in the works for Sony, including an animated Venom film and an original sci-fi story called The Earthling.)
You might reasonably ask why we’re so doubtful about a Metal Gear movie, given how successful the brand has been in gaming since 1987, when the first Metal Gear was released. Partly, it’s just history: Fool us once with news of a Metal Gear Solid adaptation, shame on you; fool us, like, four distinct times, shame on us. But also, there’s a fundamental issue with Metal Gear Solid as a movie idea, one that leans even further into some of the worst trends of the game-to-film boom of the last few years: Almost everything that’s cool about Hideo Kojima’s games was lifted straight from the action movies and spy thrillers he so feverishly loves, so what value do you get from transporting those lovingly lifted visual and thematic ideas back into film? (Admittedly, there are cool video game-specific things about Metal Gear Solid, but it’s hard to imagine them translating into the movies; Psycho Mantis probably isn’t going to turn to theater audiences and tell them he knows they’ve been playing Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night.)
On the other hand, the brand still has big-name recognition—despite Kojima divorcing himself from the franchise after cutting ties with Konami during the troubled development of Metal Gear Solid V a few years back. In any case, Stein and Lipovsky—who have a lot of projects on their plate right now, including an alleged Gremlins movie and a sequel to their 2018 film Freaks—have a pretty solid track record of getting stuff made at this point, so the chance that we’ll get a movie that at least loosely follows the events of Shadow Moses Island Incident rises from “Never gonna happen” to “Hey, who knows in this crazy world” with this news.
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