Call of Duty will be Activision Blizzard’s next major game franchise to make the jump to the big screen — its last attempt, Warcaft, released in 2016 — and the action film looks like it’s close to having a director. Sicario 2: Soldado director Stefano Sollima is reportedly in talks with Activision Blizzard Studios to lead the project.
According to Variety, Sollima is currently in negotiations to direct the Call of Duty film, which is being produced by Activision Blizzard Studios presidents Stacey Sher and Nick van Dyk alongside Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.
The Sicario films are set in the present day and focus on the FBI’s ongoing battle with cartels smuggling drugs into the United States from Mexico. The first film was directed by Arrival and Blade Runner: 2049 director Denis Villeneuve, and it was more action oriented than his other projects. According to Stacey Sher, Activision Blizzard Studios plans to release several films that focus on different types of Call of Duty stories, including one similar to Black Ops and one that feels like Modern Warfare.
“And then maybe something that is more of a hybrid, where you are looking at private, covert operations, while a public operation is going on,” Sher added in an interview with The Guardian. This sounds similar to Sledgehammer’s 2014 game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, a sequel to which was shelved in favor of last year’s Call of Duty: WWII.
The original Sicario‘s cast was led by Emily Blunt as an FBI agent brought in by a covert CIA team attempting to stop a deadly cartel. She was written out of the sequel, but it will see the return of both Benecio del Toro and Josh Brolin. The series’ ambiguous morality and questioning of the government’s role in protecting citizens made the first film much more interesting than a traditional action film, though its explosion-heavy moments were still expertly directed.
We’re hoping the final Call of Duty film will be more critically successful than Warcraft. It was directed by Duncan Jones, best known for the fantastic sci-fi film Moon, but received scathing reviews, including one from Digital Trends.