Shawn Levy Steps Out of the Director's Chair for UNCHARTED

Stranger Things director and producer Shawn Levy has been developing a film adaptation of Uncharted with Tom Holland for awhile now. He was supposed to direct the film, but he’s now dropping out of the project.

He hasn’t lost faith in it or anything. There’s no news of creative differences either. The reason he’s dropping out is because another film project he was working on got the green light first, so he’s committing to that.

The movie that he’s leaving Uncharted for is called Free Guy, and it stars Ryan Reynolds. The story for Free Guy is in the “vein of The Truman Show, where a bank teller stuck in his routine discovers he’s a background character in a rather brutal open world, action-adventure video game and he is the only one capable of saving his world.”

With Levy out, there’s an empty director’s chair for Uncharted waiting to be filled. I hope that they get someone good who might steer it in a different direction, because a lot of fans don’t really care for the direction it’s going.

The story is said to take place “when Nathan Drake (who’s the lead of that game) and Sully, I guess you’d call him his surrogate father, were much younger. It’s an origin story that evolves out of the game but is not from the game." Holland is taking on the role of a young Nathan Drake.

Levy previously talked about the film saying that it's an Indiana Jones film for a new generation and explained:

"So, for me, it was a fact that the game is awesome; the spirit of the game, with its action set pieces, it’s imaginative setting, and above all, the kind of rogue swagger of Nathan. Those are things that I think make for a great movie. And, for me, the kind of the big, like the aha moment, if you want to call it that, was I met with Tom Holland and he kind of put it really succinctly and saying, if we do the origin of Drake, that is something that we haven’t seen as the plot of games 1, 2, 3, 4; we’ve seen a snippet of an origin of Sully and Drake meeting in the past, but here’s maybe an opportunity to do a treasure-hunting action movie with attitude, with a protagonist — and chapter of the protagonist’s life — that you can’t get for free, at home, by just playing the game.

So, we’re trying to kind of take the spirit and the tone and the attitude of the game — and the crazy, visual spectacle of it — but apply it to this Drake chapter that you haven’t seen told. Hopefully, if we can get that right, what you’re doing is: you’re doing right by Uncharted, and you’re also giving an Indiana Jones-type franchise to an audience that didn’t grow up on Indiana Jones.”

Who would you like to see come on board to direct Uncharted now that Levy has stepped away from it?

Source: THR