Yep, you learn that proper: Grammy-award profitable music artist and actor Donald Glover is directing and starring in a live-action collection adapting Krafton’s battle royale recreation, PUBG.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is getting the Hollywood therapy with a TV present that might be written, produced, directed by, and starring Donald Glover. His brother, Stephen Glover, is additionally concerned within the undertaking as a co-writer and government producer.
Different government producers on the collection embody Michael Schaefer for NEON TV, Fam Udeorji for Gilga, and Taeseok Jang and Sujin Lee for LV3H. As instructed in a press launch shared with IGN, Krafton — the South Korean gaming conglomerate that owns the franchise — is intent on increasing the IP into “unique leisure content material.” LV3H, its leisure entity, is additionally serving to develop and produce the collection.
Whereas making a whole collection primarily based on a recreation the place 100 gamers are dropped onto an island to struggle to the dying would possibly look like a little bit of a stretch, there’s really some fairly deep lore that explains the ‘why’ of all of it. Admittedly, PUBG was initially created as a purely multiplayer expertise, however it has since been fleshed out with an encompassing narrative that may be learn on its official web site.
The lengthy and in need of it is that the Battlegrounds are the brainchild of a billionaire named Sergei Kalimnik, who was the lone survivor of a lethal Soviet assault on the fictional island of Erangel in 1965. After experiencing “17 days of battle” and watching Soviet officers try to get rid of their victims’ corpses, he got here up with the sensible thought of finally shopping for the island and recreating his childhood trauma on a grand scale — conscripting 100 folks and forcing them to struggle till just one stays.
It’s form of like Squid Recreation, when you consider it; these experiments expanded to different locales, whereas viewers of shadowy, untouchable elites, very like the VIPs from Netflix’s hit South Korean thriller collection, watch from afar. In keeping with the PUBG Universe web page, this additionally by some means ties again to a centuries-old custom referred to as ‘Magna Venari: The Nice Hunt’ that started within the early fifteenth Century. Described because the “looking of human prey,” it sought to reply a single query: “Why do some survive when others don’t?”
There’s, surprisingly, a lot for Glover to work with right here. And given his abilities in showbiz (Atlanta, Group, Swarm), I’m genuinely eager to see what he brings to the desk from the PUBG world.
This is the most recent online game to attain a celebrity-led adaptation following information of Michael B. Jordan’s Battlefield film. He, alongside Christopher McQuarrie, are reportedly purchasing the variation round to completely different studios in hopes of bringing Digital Arts’ in style navy recreation collection to the silver display. Sony has emerged as a frontrunner to snag the movie, although some other information stays nebulous for now.
Picture Credit: Mila Gruber/WireImage through Getty Photos
Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s Information Editor. With ten years of expertise reporting on video games and leisure, she’s received a storied background within the combating recreation neighborhood, influencer information, and viral on-line tendencies. Discover her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.