Game publishing giant Ubisoft has invested heavily in the film industry over the past several years, with big screen takes on franchises like Splinter Cell and Watch Dogs already in development, but the company isn’t done yet. A film based on this year’s game The Division is indeed in the works, and it will star Jessica Chastain and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Both Chastain and Gyllenhaal will also produce the films through their respective production companies, Freckle Films and Nine Stories.
“The battle to restore order to Manhattan is being made into a movie by Ubisoft Motion Pictures,” the publisher says. This language suggests that the film may be a straight adaptation of March’s game, rather than a story set in the same universe. No other concrete information on the film’s narrative was offered with the announcement.
This will not be Gyllenhaal’s first time starring in a video game movie, or even one based on a Ubisoft property. The actor played the lead role of Dastan in 2010’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time — one of the highest-earning video game movies of all time — before the action-adventure series was put on the back burner. The massively popular Assassin’s Creed franchise has largely taken its place, with its own film scheduled to release later this year.
Curiously, the only one of Ubisoft’s active “Tom Clancy’s” brands to not receive a film adaptation is Rainbow Six. While Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, and The Division were all conceived by the company in-house, Rainbow Six was created by the late author himself, with a novel published before it made the jump to games. Character John Clark has appeared in other Clancy films, however, having been portrayed by both Willem Dafoe in Clear and Present Danger and Liev Schreiber in The Sum of All Fears.
