Director of Pacific Rim Uprising and Daredevil showrunner Steven DeKnight recently revealed that he has talked to Sony about the possibility of an R-Rated God of War movie.
Whilst promoting Pacific Rim Uprising, which comes out on DigitalHD this week, DeKnight talked with ComicBook.com where he elaborated on his interest in directing a God of War movie.
Here's what DeKnight had to say:
I would love to see it. Somebody had asked me about video games and I've always been a fan of God of War. I think the latest game was just so beautiful and phenomenal. I would love to tackle God of War movie or I would love to see somebody put that up on the big screen. Somebody asked me, 'Well, who would you have to have Kratos?'
And immediately for me: Dave Bautista would be the man. I think he can do anything. You can do drama, real emotion, humor, action. What would I like to see from a movie like that? A bit of a tricky question because there hasn't really been 100% success of translating a video game to a movie. It's a very, very tricky process.
Dave Bautista recently made clear his interest in video game movie roles - and we're sure fans would love to see the Guardians of the Galaxy star cast as Kratos. DeKnight spoke of conversations with Sony about the project and explained why he thinks video game-based movies don't often go down well with audiences.
I had some early conversations with the good people at Sony PlayStation about it and my biggest thing is, look, you gotta approach it like a book. Approach it like adapting Jaws. For people who've read Jaws, the movie is very different but they're both fantastic. So you have to be able to take the source material and make it work as a movie.
I think that's part of the reason oftentimes video game movies don't work is because you can't translate the video game experience into a movie. You gotta take the characters and the situations and the emotions and make it work for a movie. Which means a lot of times you've got to change things, which is very dicey obviously because you don't want alienate video game fans, but you have to make a film that works within the context of a movie by itself. Very difficult.
I would love to tackle it, I have no idea if that's going to happen. I'm not in any kind of conversations right now, but hopefully somebody will make a movie out of that franchise. I think it's a phenomenal franchise.
The director then explained that, should God of War be adapted into a film, "it needs to be R-rated" - as you can see below:
It's funny because when I sat down with the Sony PlayStation people, one of the first things we both said is R-rated because I always use the original Conan the Barbarian as my touchstone, that it needs to be R-rated. I don't think there's a way to tell that story and make it PG, nor should it be.
And thankfully because of Deadpool, people are much more willing to try that R-rated there with genre work now, again. So, yeah, without a doubt R-rated. I mean not on as far as Spartacus, that was more NC-17, but definitely R-rated.
What do you think about the prospect of an R-rated God of War film directed by Steven DeKnight? Considering Dave Bautista's dream role being a video game character, do you think he'd make for a good live-action Kratos?