Jessica Chastain is the latest star in talks to appear in the upcoming cinematic adaptation of Ubisoft’s The Division. She would join Jake Gyllenhaal, who boarded the project in June.
Chastain is known for her dramatic work, including her Oscar-nominated performance in The Help, but has also appeared in genre pictures like Interstellar and The Martian. Her starring role in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty was a major breakthrough for her Hollywood career, and may have served to recommend her for the part in The Division.
It’s currently unclear just how closely the movie adaptation will adhere to the game’s plot. It’s possible that Chastain could play a character inspired by injured agent Faye Lau, but there’s a good chance that the film will stray farther from its source material, in the vein of the upcoming Assassin’s Creed movie.
Indeed, the film version of The Division is being developed in the same manner as that project, which is set for a December 2016 release. Ubisoft packaged Assassin’s Creed in-house before pitching it to studios, and that’s the same process that’s being used here, according to a report from The Hollywood Reporter.
Ubisoft is aggressively pursuing film adaptations of its franchises. As well as The Division and Assassin’s Creed, the studio recently reaffirmed that Tom Hardy is set to star in a version of Splinter Cell, which was initially announced way back in 2012.
Of course, it’s something of a risky strategy to continue developing projects before any of these films have come to fruition — especially given the bad reputation carried by a high majority of video game movies.
A lot is riding on the success of Assassin’s Creed, which will star Michael Fassbender opposite Marion Cotillard, as well as Jeremy Irons. The footage we’ve seen so far looks great, but the film will have to be a big commercial success to make the rest of Ubisoft’s slate seem viable.
