According to Variety, writer/director Stephen Gaghan (Syriana, Gold) has been hired to script and helm a feature film adaptation of Ubisoft‘s popular video game, Tom Clancy’s The Division. The 2016 game was a New York City-set third person shooter that took place in a near future where a smallpox pandemic has wrecked the city. The titular group is tasked with rebuilding operations in Manhattan, seeking out the cause of the outbreak, and also dealing with incidents of crime plaguing the city in the aftermath of the epidemic.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Chastain are attached to both star in and produce the picture, which comes to us courtesy of Ubisoft Motion Pictures, Freckle Films, and Nine Stories. Ubisoft themselves will be charged with shopping the project around to studios. As part of the announcement, the following statement was released by Gaghan, who is no stranger to video games, having penned the story for Activision’s Call of Duty: Ghosts…
“I’m excited to work with Ubisoft Motion Pictures and collaborate with their team at Massive Entertainment to bring ‘The Division’ to the big screen. They’re great guys, exceptionally creative, and willing to take risks.
The game has been an enormous success, in large part due to the visual landscape they created, their vision of a mid-apocalyptic Manhattan. It’s immersive, wonderfully strange, and yet familiar, filled with possibilities.
It’s also remarkable to be able to collaborate with Jessica Chastain and Jake Gyllenhaal early in the process. We all feel the story Ubisoft created is more relevant than ever.”
Ubisoft Motion Pictures was most recently responsible for the the universally=panned Fox adaptation of Assassin’s Creed. The Michael Fassbender-starring film cost $125 million to produce and only managed to drum up $53.4 million domestically and $188.3 million worldwide. They also have a film version of Splinter Cell set up at Fox, with Tom Hardy tentatively attached to star. Here’s hoping that The Division and Splinter Cell fare better for them, both in terms of quality and success.
