There’s a paradox that’s been cropping up more and more of late, as movie and TV studios have finally figured out how to suck cash out of intellectual properties that originally started in the world of video games. To wit: As technology got better over the last 25 years, gaming developed a powerful obsession with recreating many of the story beats, visuals, and general vibes of action movies and other genre staples, creating playable and plausible versions of zombie movies, war films, spy thrillers, and more. Many of these games—The Last Of Us, Call Of Duty, Metal Gear Solid, and various others—subsequently became both extremely popular and extremely lucrative, to the point that studios started getting interested in them as potential fodder for adaptation. Hence the paradox: If a game got big because it was successful at copying popular movies, and is now being turned into one of those movies, what do you actually get? More bluntly: What the fuck is the point of a Michael B. Jordan Battlefield movie?
This (admittedly over-prefaced) question brought to you by news from The Hollywood Reporter today, which notes that Jordan and regular Mission: Impossible guy Christopher McQuarrie have embarked on plans for a film adaptation of Electronic Arts’ long-running war shooter franchise. (McQuarrie will write, produce, and direct, while Jordan is on the hook to produce and only possibly star; the recent Oscar winner does have a pretty full dance card at the moment, after all.) Numerically, it makes a sense: Last year’s Battlefield 6 ended up being the best-selling game in the United States in 2025, managing to beat out its biggest rival, Call Of Duty, in the process. And it’s not like the Battlefield games don’t have any story; indeed, they often have extremely convoluted ones, pulled from both the history and future of modern military conflict (as well as any dozen or so Tom Clancy plots you might care to name). But these narratives are, in the grand scheme of things, vestigial: Ballast that buffs up a package that is largely predicated on allowing players to play out their own war film in online high fidelity, surrounded by their buddies, and also the assembled mass of humanity who play these games on random servers in betwixt shouting slurs and taking fat rips off their bongs.
The upshot being, there’s no real sense of what a Battlefield movie looks like, besides “soldiers shouting and shooting people.” But don’t try telling that to the money: McQuarrie and Jordan have teamed up with EA to build this package, which apparently opened up for what’s expected to be aggressive bidding from studios earlier this week. (Although possibly not Paramount, which is already going all-in on a Call Of Duty adaptation of its own.)
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