It was previously reported that the movie adaptation of Naughty Dog's "The Last of Us" has entered a development slump, with no further move to get the film project moving. But Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann did confirm in the interview with IGN that the adaptation of "Uncharted" is plodding along forward.
According to Druckmann, he and the rest of Naughty Dog have only been slightly involved with the film, which is being produced by Sony Pictures. Druckmann wrote the script for "The Last of Us" and reveals that the script for the "Uncharted" movie is seeing a few revisions and alterations at the time being.
"Every once in a while they'll come in and they'll present to us: here's the script, here's what we're thinking. We'll tell them what we think works, what we think doesn't work," Druckmann explained in the interview. "That's where we're at. Last I heard is they got a new screenwriter, but we haven't seen anything in a while."
Druckmann also confirmed that Naughty Dog's primary role is to ensure that the film studios get the characters of Nathan Drake, Elena and Sully right. The director continued to explain that the core mechanic of the story was to get Drake's relationship with Elena and Sully right otherwise the movie wouldn't work.
This appears to be a major step in the right direction. Previous video games that were given the film adaptation skewered the characterization of many primary characters, such as how Liu Kang in "Mortal Kombat" entered the tournament for revenge instead of being the Chosen One and how the "Resident Evil" characters from the games became glamourized cameos in the films.
It is undetermined at this point how deep Naughty Dog's interaction with Sony Pictures go beyond giving advice in regards to characters and the script but it does appear to be less so in comparison to how Blizzard and Ubisoft are handling the "Warcraft" and "Assassin's Creed" movies respectively.
"Uncharted" will be released in theaters by June 30, 2017.
