Universal/VolitionGreat news guys, that film adaption of the Saints Row franchises we’ve all been asking for is finally in development.
While there are normally a million ways I could see such a project going hilariously wrong, the fact that F. Gary Gray, director of The Fate Of The Furious is attached to direct gives me some hope.
As a man with experience in over the top, ridiculously bombastic action sequences, I see him as perfectly suited to the tongue in cheek nature of Saints Row.
As reported by Deadline, development on the film still in the early stages, but a screenplay is apparently on the way from Greg Russo, who is also currently scripting the Mortal Kombat movie reboot for Warner Bros, as well as the Resident Evil movie reboot that I’d forgotten about until literally just now.
While details on the film’s plot are non existent at this stage (presumably because there’s no script yet), I’d assume that the adaptation will take more from the later Saints Row Games. The first game was quite a serious affair, before subsequent entries turned up the comedy and more over the top action.
In an age where most action movies are praised for embracing their inherent ridiculousness, it’d be odd for a Saints Row movie not to do the same. Especially since the franchise is pretty synonymous with light-hearted craziness and pop culture parody at this point, so a gritty reboot would ring hollow.
If you’ve never played one, the Saints Row is kind of like a GTA inspired open world action-adventure series developed by Volition and published by Deep Silver. It follows the often bombastic story of a gang known as the in the fictional cities of Stilwater and Steelport.
VolitionThe first game in the Saints Row series was released for Xbox 360 back in 2006, and the most recent entry was Saints Row IV, which landed on various consoles in 2013. A Nintendo Switch port of Saints Row The Third (the third game in the serious obviously, you IDIOTS) is coming later this month (May 10).
In other video game movie news, the first trailer for the live-action Sonic movie recently dropped and oh my god, the reaction has not been good.
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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.