At the risk of catching a [citation needed] tag, we’re going to go ahead and say Steven Spielberg likes war movies. And also, it’s been revealed in the past, war video games. His son, game designer Max Spielberg, gave an interview last year, for example, in which he noted that his dad—who briefly indulged in video game production himself many years back, creating the genuinely fun Jenga riff Boom Blox for the Nintendo Wii—is actually a fairly avid gamer. That apparently especially applies to the Call Of Duty franchise, gaming’s biggest series of military shooters, which Spielberg indulges in regularly. (Only the story campaigns, though, so that x_BruceTheSharksDad_x you headshot in Black Ops 6 last week probably wasn’t the Oscar-winner.) All of which leads up to the very weird revelation this week that Spielberg apparently volunteered to direct a version of the film adaptation of the military shooter franchise that was just announced at Paramount… and got turned down.
This comes from Puck News, which recently reported that Spielberg pitched himself to game publisher Activision as a natural fit for a CoD movie. (On account of being Steven Spielberg.) That being said, and also on account of being Steven Spielberg, he had some conditions for his participation, which apparently “spooked” the massive games publisher. That is, he wanted final cut of the movie, and full control over the production.
Not being a massive games publisher ourselves, we genuinely don’t know how we’d respond to those admittedly daunting caveats. On the one hand, sure, you’re taking your company’s single biggest brand and taking it into theaters, potentially generating either billions of dollars or a total fizzle that spoils the waters for years; we get being nervous about handing off control of that ball to anybody else. On the other hand: Holy shit, would people go see Steven Spielberg’s Call Of Duty. Even Spielberg’s more mercenary or zeitgeist-guided flicks—looking at you, Ready Player One—still made $600 million at the box office, while also seeing him push himself in pursuit of his various artistic obsessions. There are no sure things in making movies, but this one feels like such an obvious slam dunk that passing it up can’t help but seem kind of wild.
As it stands, the Call Of Duty movie doesn’t have a director attached. (Stefano Sollima, who previously helmed Sicario: Day Of The Soldado, was named in connection with the project several years back, but that push was apparently abandoned.) As for Spielberg, he’s keeping typically busy: Although details (and a title) are still being kept quiet, he reportedly recently finished filming a new movie with Emily Blunt, currently scheduled for a Summer 2026 release with Universal.
