Len Wiseman WILL direct GEARS OF WAR

Despite leaving the negotiation table for some time last year, eventually Live Free or Die Hard director Len Wiseman has been confirmed by the WB owned New Line as the man chosen to bring the popular video game Gears of War, Microsoft's second highest earner after Halo, to the big screen. Chris Morgan (Wanted) is currently re-writing from an early Stuart Beattie (Collateral) draft says Variety.

"Gears" revolves around a world reeling from an invasion by aliens known as the Locust and a small team of elite soldiers who fight to retake the planet Sera and save its human inhabitants.

Morgan and Wiseman are also working together on bringing the sci-fi epic Shell Game to the big screen, an epic that Wiseman claims he has wanted to direct for five years but until last year could never drum up the financial investment. So remarkably he gets the funding he needs from Lakeshore/Columbia but soon puts the project on the shelf when WB come calling with Gears of War. The big question at this point is "can Gears of War be made into a popular movie?" Well it's in a similar kind of position as the massively popular video game Doom and very much has the potential of being turned into a horrible heartless action movie if translated verbatim from it's source. Hopefully the script is full on character because when you are making a movie it is that which is of most importance. Having said all that, Len Wiseman's frantic style of directing would probably suit a video game adaptation and I actually think this is a perfect project for him. I'm strangely looking forward to this one which we will probably see in 2010.