Ruben Fleischer may be the next unfortunate director to take on the cursed Uncharted movie

By Sam Barsanti | January 13, 2020 | 9:24pm

Aux Features Film

Ruben Fleischer may be the next unfortunate director to take on the cursed Uncharted movie

Photo: Frazer Harrison

At the end of 2019, Bumblebee director (and Laika studio boss) Travis Knight dropped out of Sony’s Uncharted movie—an adaptation of the video game series of the same name. It was the latest in a very long line of setbacks for the movie, which has more or less gotten and then lost a new director every year or two for the past decade, not to mention getting and then losing Mark Wahlberg as a star, rejecting fan wishes by not getting Nathan Fillion as a star, and then Mark Wahlberg rejoining as a different character when Tom Holland was brought in to replace him as a younger version of series protagonist Nathan Drake. Now, Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer has drawn the short straw in Hollywood, with Deadline reporting that he’s the latest to come on to the ill-fated Uncharted movie.

Fleischer is on a relative hot streak at Sony, with his last two movies being the studio’s Zombieland: Double Tap and Venom (one of which was a huge hit), so it stands to reason that Sony would have some faith that he’d be able to do something with this movie. After all, it doesn’t exactly seem like a hard sell: The video games are already a take on Indiana Jones with a quippy Ryan Reynolds-type in the lead, plus the built-in bonus of brand recognition, so Sony just has to set up a camera, lift some plot points and dialogue from the game, and it’ll be a reasonably successful movie. Maybe Fleischer will be the one to pull it off? Recent history suggests that nobody can do it, but if DC was able to get that Flash movie off the ground after all those issues, surely Sony can make Uncharted.