Jason Momoa walked away from Justin Lin's "Helldivers" in June, and now, according to Deadline, Alan Ritchson is in talks to headline the Sony/PlayStation video game adaptation. No deal closed yet, but these things rarely leak unless somebody wants them to.
If it closes, Ritchson plays one of the helldivers, with more roles to come. Gary Dauberman (“Annabelle”) wrote it. Sony has it dated for November 10, 2027.
The source material, for the uninitiated, is Arrowhead Game Studios' co-op shooter — muscle in armor defending "Super Earth" from bugs and robots in a war game that's either satire or just very loud, depending on who you ask. The 2015 original was a cult thing. The 2024 sequel was PlayStation's fastest-selling game ever, 12 million copies in 12 weeks, past 20 million now. That's the entire reason this movie exists.
This also puts Helldivers at least fourth in line at PlayStation Productions behind "Uncharted," "Gran Turismo" and "Until Dawn," with "The Last Of Us" and "Twisted Metal" holding down the TV side — a batting average of one great, one fine, and a few nobody brings up.
Ritchson is, of course, Reacher, and he's spent the last few years trying to convert streaming muscle into theatrical success. Mixed results: "The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare" was okay, and "Motor City" was gimmicky, making $3.9M against a $30M budget. The thing that actually worked was "War Machine,” Netflix's most-watched movie of the year, ninth all-time on the list, sequel already titled "War Machines."
The real question is Lin.
It's been twenty-plus years since "Better Luck Tomorrow," and he still hasn't made anything as alive as that movie. "Tokyo Drift" was the most underrated of the 'Fast' run, and "Fast Five" was a legitimately decent action movie, but somewhere across five of those he stopped being a filmmaker and became a logistics man. "Star Trek Beyond" landed, "F9" didn't, and then he walked off "Fast X" days into shooting, when the production was still on second unit. His indie comeback, "Last Days," premiered at Sundance and was panned — 32% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now he's doing a video game adaptation about space fascists.
Garland's script is written. Boyle called it "fantastic" in that same interview, Murphy says he's ready, and Boyle wants to direct. All that's missing is the money.