Director Brad Peyton Signs On To Rampage Movie Project
Rampage is a classic arcade game where you play as a Godzilla knockoff stomping around, smashing buildings and eating people for points. If you didn’t know Hollywood has been trying to make a feature film out of it, you do now. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has signed on to star and Carlton Cuse is crafting the script. Now Brad Peyton, who directed the disaster film San Andreas, has been attached to direct. His comments are interesting, if only because they help me understand the mindset of a guy who thinks a Rampage movie that comes out a full decade after the last Rampage game was ever sold is a super idea.
Most people were thinking with The Rock attached there would be a good chance this movie would be less than serious, because….it’s Rampage; there’s nothing serious about it. Peyton thinks differently, and that he can make a disaster film in the vein of San Andreas out of this property. It’s simple, Peyton explains, you just don’t read up on the source material.
“If they called me tomorrow to do Call of Duty, I wouldn’t want to play any of the Call of Duty games,” he said. “I’d have to come up with something that deserves to be its own thing. That’s where a lot of these movies can go wrong.”
Others disagree, however, including some in Peyton’s field. Paul Anderson, the dude who’s given the world so many Resident Evil movies, feels actually knowing about the thing you’re adapting is kind of crucial (despite the tangent RE moves have gone off on). “You see filmmakers giving interviews, saying, ‘I never played the video game,'” he said. “It is very disrespectful to the IP. How can you adapt something without understanding the original IP? You’d never dream of adapting a book without reading it. Somehow, people feel with video games it’s OK just to kind of jump in there without really understanding its DNA.”
The Rampage movie has no release date yet, and it’s still too early to promise you it will be completed at all. Don’t count on anything faithful, though.