Back in June we reported that Sony was all ready to get to work on an adaptation of the videogame, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, with Kyle Ward (writer of the upcoming Kane & Lynch movie) onboard to pen the screenplay. However Latino Review is now reporting that Ward is off the movie, due to contractual problems.
As Kyle had signed up to write Hitman 2 before he agreed to script Uncharted, he was obliged to write that screenplay first, which would have meant Sony would be waiting around for anything up to a year before he could properly start work on their movie. As they weren’t willing to do that (Sony wants to fast-track the movie), Ward has been let go and Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer are now in talks to replace him. This isn’t necessarily great news, as Oppenheimer and Donnelly’s work on Sahara and A Sound Of Thunder wasn’t exactly great, although they are also handling Marcus Nispel’s upcoming reboot of Conan the Barbarian.
The Uncharted videogame follows a descendent of Sir Francis Drake, Nate Drake, a treasure hunter who thinks he has learned the whereabouts of El Dorado, the fabled golden city. As well as having to battle competing treasure seekers, he also has to do battle with mutated descendants of Spaniards and Nazis, who want to stop Nate getting to his goal. As the game was designed to feel like an Indiana Jones style big summer movie, it’s unsuprising Hollywood is itiching to get a film version into cinemas as soon as they can.