Ubisoft Motion Pictures has only gone and officially announced a live-action adaptation of The Division, with Jake Gyllenhaal attached to star.
The Nightcrawler actor will be joined by Jessica Chastain (The Martian, Interstellar), to bring Ubisoft’s popular third person shooter to the big screen.
Gerard Guillemot, chief executive of Ubisoft Motion Pictures said:
We are excited to collaborate with Jessica and Jake, two of Hollywood’s most talented actors and perfect creative collaborators to help bring Tom Clancy’s The Division to the big screen.
Vice president Matt Phelps added:
Attaching Jake and Jessica is part of our development philosophy of working closely with top talent from the earliest stages to collaborate on a high quality film.
Riva Marker’s Nine Stories will be involved with development of the adaptation, as will Chastain’s Freckle Films, and Gyllenhaal himself.
For those who might not be aware, The Division was one of Ubisoft’s most successful videogame launches ever, and one of the biggest new IP launches in videogame history – obviously a movie adaptation seems like a safe bet.
Set in a mostly abandoned New York City in the midst of a killer virus, with riots aplenty, I’d say The Division movie has some potential for real drama and intense action.
Ubisoft’s first major movie adaptation is Assassin’s Creed, which stars Michael Fassbender and opens on December 21, 2016. The best course of action is probably to wait and see how that does before we get excited about The Division.
After all these years, you’d hope a genuinely great videogame movie is finally coming. Between this, the new Tomb Raider, and Assassin’s Creed, one of them has to be good – right?
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.