New Line plans Gears film
Epic on board to help.
Homoerotic shooter on steroids Gears of War has been snaffled up by Hollywood bigwig New Line Cinema, for a possible summer 2009 release.
Collateral and Pirates of the Caribbean writer Stuart Beattie will be handling the screenplay, but there's no word on a director just yet. Perhaps Mr. Boll might show interest.
The rights were handed over by game developer Epic, whose lead designer for Gears, Cliff Bleszinski, will take a role as executive producer - presumably making sure his life story is correctly portrayed.
There's no news on which stars we can expect to feature, or what kind of story we can expect, but given the amount of back story Epic somewhat presumptuously created - with one eye on future films and novels - there should be plenty of content to draw on.
"We wanted to make an entertainment property that's not just for games but for other media," Mark Rein, Epic's co-founder and vice president told Variety. "Our first and foremost philosophy is to do no harm, so we debated heavily the idea of doing a movie at all, but we feel we stacked the deck in our favour by working with the best players."
Whilst nothing has been announced yet, a sequel to the first game is "assured", perhaps even in time for a summer 2009 release with the film.
"Sweet".