The Metro 2033 movie, which was announced back in 2016, has been scrapped. The rights to the property have been reverted back to, Dmitry Glukhovsky, the author of the source material.
Glukhovsky recently explained why the adaptation has been canned in an interview with VG247. According to Glukhovsky, the film was cancelled on account of scriptwriter F. Scott Frazier's intention to "Americanize" it - moving the film's setting from Moscow to Washington DC.
This change would have practicall remade Metro 2033 into something entirely unrecognisable - as Glukhovsky explained:
A lot of things didn’t work out in Washington DC. In Washington DC, Nazis don’t work, Communists don’t work at all, and the Dark Ones don’t work. Washington DC is a black city basically. That’s not at all the allusion I want to have, it’s a metaphor of general xenophobia but it’s not a comment on African Americans at all. So it didn’t work.
The Dark Ones serve as the driving antagonists throughout both iterations of Metro 2033, in which they pose as a new mutant threat aggressively descending from the surface to Artyom's home station. Glukhovsky explained that the Dark Ones would have been warped, unrecognisably so, thereby negating Metro's themes.
They had to replace the Dark Ones with some kind of random beasts and as long as the beasts don’t look human, the entire story of xenophobia doesn’t work which was very important to me as a convinced internationalist. They turned it into a very generic thing.
What do you think of Glukhovsky's statements? Are you just as opposed to the idea of Metro 2033 being unrecognisably reworked?
Metro Exodus is set to release on February 22nd for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.