The successful video game series Mass Effect is getting film treatment, Heat Vision reports. Legendary Pictures, who picked up rights to the Electronic Arts-BioWare game, is once again teaming with Warner Bros to produce and distribute the film. I Am Legend and Thor screenwriter Mark Protosevich will take on script duties.
Mass Effect was released in 2008 and it is “an epic sci-fi action game set in the year 2183, focusing on a human soldier and his starship, the SSV Normandy. The galaxy-spanning story involves a long-extinct race of aliens, dormant beacons and more alien species than you can shake a lightsaber at.” The follow-up was just released this past January.
Producers Avi and Ari Arad are also developing a feature adaptation of the popular PS3 game Uncharted. Heat Vision says this “project is still in the early stages of development” but that Avatar has been a huge breakthrough for sci-fi films based on alien characters. Producer Thomas Tull said Mass Effect is “ripe for translation’ and it has “depth, compelling characters and an engaging back story” while Arad said the game is “a parable whose conflicts mirror the ones we currently face in our own world. This story emphasizes the need for all cultures to learn to work together.”
In the same story it says Protosevich is still “writing the English-language translation of Oldboy for Mandate.” Although it was reported late last year that Steven Spielberg and Will Smith stepped away from the project, it sounds like it is still happening to much disdain.
At least it sounds like Mass Effect would make a good adaptation, check out a trailer for the recent game below.
What do you think about a Mass Effect film? Are you upset the Oldboy remake is still alive?