An R-rated Uncharted movie makes about as much sense as a gritty Tweenies reboot where everyone smokes and has knife fights instead of playtime, but that’s what we nearly got from A-Team and Smokin’ Aces director Joe Carnahan once upon a time.
The Uncharted movie, not the Tweenies reboot. I just wanted to make that clear.
While Carnahan’s script has since been binned for a new live-action Uncharted project starring Spider-Man actor Tom Holland as a young Nathan Drake, it turns out that when Carnahan was in charge of the flick Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds was the number one choice to play the iconic treasure hunter.
Carnahan told Discussing Film that Reynolds was “really, really close” to taking the role, and that he was an obvious choice for the director, given that his vision for the film was “skewed to an adult audience” (ugh).
Ultimately it wasn’t to be, as Carnahan explained:
It was definitely skewed to an adult audience and I think that Ryan Reynolds was very, very close to doing it and they called his options on Deadpool and took him out of consideration. But I think he was really close to playing Drake.
Elsewhere in the interview, Carnahan touched on what his vision for Uncharted might have looked like, revealing that it started with a young Drake before establishing the adult Drake like in Uncharted 3. He also claimed the script was “really entertaining, funny and it worked”, speculating that Sony might even use some of it in the retooled project.
Carnahan also seemed to make his feelings pretty clear on Uncharted 4 creative director Neil Druckmann. In the interview he revealed he wanted Amy Hennig’s (Uncharted’s original writer) approval, but didn’t care much for what Druckmann made of it.
He said:
I think whatshisface – I’m not a fan – the guy that kind of stole credit for it… Amy created that world and she was the one that I really wanted to please. That other guy, whatever the hell his name is, he’s a hitchhiker.
The Uncharted movie in its new form is currently lingering in development hell, and the latest director attached to the project is Dan Trachtenberg, who helmed the outstanding 10 Cloverfield Lane.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.