Dawn of the Lead

A week ago I posted the beautiful, haunting trailer for the game Dead Island. The thing has apparently – and deservedly – taken the Internets by storm, and there’s now talk of a movie. And some talk it is!

First off, The Wrap reported that Union Entertainment and producer Sean Daniel (of dubious The Wolfman fame) owned the movie rights to the game.

What do you know, a few days later Dead Island’s developers Deep Silver issued a press release, saying that this was not the case. They are in talks with “major players”, though, as this interview with 24 Frames tells us. Here are some interesting snippets:

We’ve had a lot of inquiries, not only from Union but from other major players for film adaptation. The talks are very early and there’s no deal whatsoever. Right now I’d say it boils down to three or four opportunities. Some are studios, not just bonders [financiers] like Union. We’d rather go with a big studio that can bring the creative side.

We had a couple of big-name directors come to us. One of the top directors in Hollywood sent a studio his link to the trailer and said he was interested in this, and the studio contacted us.

I think this can be a good movie if it’s done right but you do have to see it as separate from the game. We’re not going to go out and write a movie script based on the game. You have too many limitations in the game you don’t have with a movie.

As for the game itself, here are some gameplay (yeah, right) pictures. I’d take these with about a handful of grains of salt, as they’re obviously manipulated to perfection. They do show promise anyway.