Columbia to hold talks with Kurt Wimmer over METAL GEAR SOLID

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

According to Coming Soon, soon after the release of the futuristic post-Matrix sci-fi movie Equilibrium in 2002, fans were "clamoring" for it's director Kurt Wimmer to helm the movie adaptation of Metal Gear Solid. It's not something I particularly remember (wasn't the movie a flop anyway?) but I will take their word for it. Equilibrium was a pretty cool movie when you finally got round to seeing it on DVD (did anyone actually see it in the theatre?), an ambitious feature with some really juicy ideas that it maybe didn't quite explore to the full because of it's attempt to be too stylish and cool in a cinema still very much feeling the effects of The Matrix. So six years on. Wimmer's possibly being knocked down a few notches on the Hollywood ladder after his female-centric futuristic sci-fi movie Ultraviolet under-performed and his reputation left a little sour after the huge recuts from Warner Bros. on the flick but finally it looks like Columbia want to talk to him about it. Producer Michael De Luca says he expects to sit down with Wimmer and talk to him about writing (and probably directing) a Metal Gear Solid movie which apparentaly is now officially a priority for Columbia.

And that's just about all we have on this one. I've said it before... Metal Gear Solid, alongside Splinter Cell, are the two easily adaptable movie franchises from popular A-List video games just waiting to be made into a money making tentpole feature. Essentially, they are just clever action thrillers and if you use the basic plot from the game and just tweak it a little for pacing and coherent storytelling then you should be on for a painless winner. Properties like Halo, Gears of War and Grand Theft Auto are slightly harder to adapt but MGS just needs an assured writer in the genre. Wimmer could be that guy. His script for the Al Pacino/Colin Farrell thriller The Recruit wasn't bad and he also co-wrote The Thomas Crown Affair. He's certainly a less eccentric writer than he is helmer, I would like to see him knock out a script for this but I'm not sure about him directing it. Glad to see the movie back up and running though.