The Uncharted Movie Loses Another Director
We wish we could say were getting an Uncharted movie at some point — Sony probably wishes they could say so too — but the project has been hit with yet another delay. This time, it’s for a very familiar reason….the director they hired had to bail.
Uncharted: The Movie was first announced in 2009 and its first director, David O. Russell, was hired in 2010. Russell left the project in 2011, and was replaced by Neil Burger (The Illusionist). Burger took one bite and split in 2012…two years after that, Sony announced the hiring of Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses). He also left one year later, and a year after that, Sony re-announced the movie and said Shawn Levy would direct. Two years later, Levy bailed.
Altogether, Uncharted has now spent over a decade in development hell, despite being (in theory) as simple to execute as an Indiana Jones ripoff would be. What hurts about this is that under their most recent directorial hire, the movie had a real shot. This time it was going to be Travis Knight, who somehow made a good Transformers movie for Paramount, and created the amazing Kubo and the Two Strings for Laika before that.
Not only will we never know what a Travis Knight Uncharted movie would be like, we may never actually see this movie at all, at the rate things are going. Knight cited “schedule conflicts” as his reason for departing, but several others have simply expressed dissatisfaction at the project’s lack of traction, implying no writer or producer seems to be able to please Sony no matter how many drafts they write.
The star of the film has also been in flux. Mark Wahlberg, Chris Pratt and (most recently) Tom Holland have all been in the running to play Nathan Drake.