From what little I know, the Helldivers game franchise is a Starship Troopers (first movie) style parody of militaristic worldviews or something. All I know is it’s not my prefered type of game, but it only matters because the latest news about an upcoming movie sparked the commentary. Neither of us need know anything about these games.
The director of the movie adaptation sure doesn’t. And it’s apparently a selling point to his getting the job.
Spencer Baculi of Bounding Into Comics is reporting that Justin Lin of “Fast & The Furious” fame is set to make a Helldivers movie, and that not knowing the source material is what got him the gig.
In waving the reddest flag possible ahead of Super Earth’s next major deployment, a live-action Helldivers film is now in production under the helm of Fast and Furious franchise director Justin Lin, whose winning pitch reportedly “leaned into” the fact that he has absolutely zero familiarity with the video game medium, let alone Arrowhead Game Studios’ acclaimed democracy simulator.
So a guy who doesn’t know Pac-Man from Cloud Strife is going to adapt a game he probably doesn’t know contains neither of those characters. At a time when bad adaptations are rampant in both Hollywood and comics, it seems that ignorance isn’t just bliss, it’s welcome. As the article goes on, I don’t need to know about the game to feel sorry for the fans because I’ve seen it happen to far too many of the shows, comics, games, and old movies I DO enjoy. It’s one thing for the studio system to not learn from past mistakes. It’s worse to see them double down on stupid and treat it like a good thing, which I’m expecting shill media to start telling us is a plus. No, it’s one of the problems with Hollywood, and while it tends to be a long standing one, it somehow gets worse when banking on the success of existing properties’ pre-existing audience runs into people who hate or at least look down on those properties and where they came from. So let’s go over this again.
Confirmed as in development courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit, the Helldivers movie will see Lin working off of a script provided by It duology and Annabelle series writer Gary Dauberman, as produced by Sony Pictures, their subsidiary PlayStation Productions, and Lin’s own Perfect Storm Entertainment.
And while a blockbuster, spectacle-heavy outing for the Helldivers franchise seems like the easiest lay-up in the world, fans would do best to hold their excitement, as according to Kit’s insider sources, “Lin is not a gamer and leaned into that as a strength when pitching his take on the material”.
“He aims to find the humanity in the characters and weave timely themes into the story, while building out a world and mythology,” the THR mainstay further relayed. “There are plenty of details waiting to be drawn in, something that is compelling to the filmmaker.”
Now I don’t know about Dauberman and his tie to video games, if he has any. You don’t have to have worked on them to make a good movie. Baculi points out that not necessarily knowing the material doesn’t mean the end product will be bad.
For example, Captain America: First Avenger director Joe Johnston has openly admitted that he “was not a fan” of the Star-Spangled Avengers’ comic book adventures (not that he disliked them, just that he didn’t care about them).
Likewise, despite having “never been a gigantic comic book fan“, director Tim Burton still managed to both capture and redefine The Dark Knight’s character in Batman (1989).
You’d think Sony would learn from Nintendo’s mistakes given their history. Also, what ever happened to the Koopalings?
I would counter, however, that First Avenger was made when Marvel Studios still had the only good committee in entertainment, one whose job was maintaining multiversal continuity while still allowing the movie continuity to find its own way. Now we have producers insisting you be ignorant of what you’re adapting or you can’t make it, which misses the whole point of Marvel Studios existing in the first place, a Disney norm in 2025. Also, the formula at the time for Marvel Studios was “(x) type movie set in a superhero universe”, in this case a World War II story. Burton was also reigned in more for Batman than the follow-up, Batman Returns, which featured The Dark Knight tossing dudes covered in bombs down shafts to explode and a grotesque in body and mind re-imagining of Oswald “Penguin” Cobblepot that still has negative influences on the character to this day. Even the original movie was more interested in the Joker because Burton is drawn towards mentally screwed up characters and situations. Batman was already back to his pre-Silver Age form in the comics long before then as the Bronze Age was already in full swing.
I also don’t think that knowing the source material would keep you from being able to find “the humanity in the characters and weave timely themes into the story”. Meanwhile the worldbuilding has already been done for him by the two games that have already come out. He doesn’t have to do what Starship Troopers did and toss out much of the original novels, including ideas brought back for the series Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles. If he goes and studies the lore of the games and creates a movie set in that world (to my knowledge you don’t play as a particular character with a set narrative like the Last Of Us games), it’s possible he might get a good adaptation out of it. There’s still a huge problem, as Baculi points out, and I’ll emphasise the important parts in bold while he italicizes his:
However, what makes the Helldivers movie case, and others like it, so particularly concerning is the fact that Lin is basically bragging about the fact that he has never cared to engage with either the original games or the video game medium in general – to say nothing of the fact that this was apparently a significant factor in Sony’s decision to hand him the job.
As history has shown, when ‘willful ignorance’ is the selling point for a project, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the end result being a complete disaster.
Look at the Super Mario Brothers. The live-action movie from 1993 is so far removed from the source material that you can tell they rejected anything about the tone, audience, themes (what little there are), genre, or anything else from the Nintendo games. Nintendo wouldn’t let any adaptations be done after that outside of the occasional manga or animated production. It wasn’t until the success of the more recent animated movie, though some will point out a few missteps there typical of modern Hollywood, that they agreed to something like the in-production Legend Of Zelda movie. Netflix’s one successful adaptation of animated and comic works was due to the creator of One-Piece hovering over their shoulders to make sure they got it right. Neil Druckmann stopped caring about getting his games’ story right, never mind how accurate HBO got The Last Of Us II, and like modern Marvel from the movies to X-Men ’97 seems intent on only getting right the stuff fans wish they wouldn’t, like forcing Rogue and Magneto together and the recent Cyclops/Jean Grey romantic issues JesterBell complained about earlier this week, or Riri Williams’ personality.
So this may turn out more like Taika Waititi’s takes on Thor, a character he admitted he hated, or Echo, whose showrunner also couldn’t care less for the character as presented in favor of girlboss Native American stereotype (couldn’t even get the tribe right) “I’m every woman” with ALL the disabilities she could put into her. If Lin looks at video games the same way Todd Phillips does comic adaptations we could even get something like the Joker movies, an outright hate letter to the character and the world he’s supposed to come from in favor of his preferred movie. I don’t know if doing the Fast & The Furious movies, a series that from what I hear gets sillier with each new sequel, translates to something like Helldivers because I lack awareness of both properties, but when you’re selling point is “my total ignorance of the entire media format and the game’s story makes me perfect adapt this story”, I hear warning alarms.
Apparently this is after Sony, a Japanese company with a strong appearance in the video game world thanks to the PlayStation, also chased Lin for a possible One-Punch Man adaptation, another live-action take on a Japanese manga and anime that people really like and Sony distributes through Crunchyroll and the absorption of Funimation. Specifically, those fans like One-Punch Man or Helldivers the way they are, while once again the studios don’t care how accurate the adaptation is so long as they already have your money by getting you to go see it for the power of the all-mighty Brand. (Though in Helldivers’ case, I hear Super Earth might be into that nonsense.) If he treats manga or anime like he does video games, don’t get your hopes up on that, either. I don’t know why Sony is so in love with this guy outside of the property that he also didn’t create (he only started directing from the third movie, Tokyo Drift) and has become a meme engine and a joke as it just gets sillier. Mention “Vin Diesel” and “family” together to the right people and you’ll see what I mean.
So odds are sadly in favor of this being another story where a director who can’t get an original idea past a lazy marketing push to only adapt pre-existing properties will use the studio’s ignorance of what they’re adapting to trick fans into seeing the movie they actually want to make by saying it’s totally this famous thing when it isn’t. That’s been going on since Captain America starred in a serial if not sooner. We were used to it, occasionally getting something close (mostly in animated series) but we were starting to break out of that with Sam Rami’s Spider-Man movies and Marvel Studios. Now we aren’t just falling back into old habits, made worse by studio frady cats and ego-driven directors obsessed with their vision over the stuff fans like, they’re getting even more blatant over it. This might work out, but history makes it highly doubtful.
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