You can’t help but admire Dave Bautista’s enthusiasm to try and get a Gears of War movie off the ground, but so far that interest hasn’t been reciprocated by Universal, who hold the live-action rights to the massively popular video game franchise.
A blockbuster adaptation was first put into development all the way back in March of 2007 at New Line, with Live Free or Die Hard director Len Wiseman signing on to helm the project, which was scheduled to shoot in 2009 and release a year later, with Fast & Furious veteran Chris Morgan also boarding Gears of War to rewrite the original draft of the script.
Everything suddenly went quiet, though, before talks reignited in 2016 once Universal had acquired the rights, but it’s failed to gain any traction since then. The last official update we heard came in the summer of 2019, when it was reported that the Gears of War film wouldn’t be a direct translation of any video game plotlines, but would tell an original story instead.
Bautista revealed earlier this year that during a meeting with Universal, he instantly shot down their pitch to talk about Fast & Furious to push Gears of War instead, and we’re now hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us Captain America 4 with Anthony Mackie was in the works long before it was confirmed – that the Army of the Dead star is happy to settle for a TV series if the feature film doesn’t get a green light.
There’s been additional chatter of Netflix potentially picking up Gears of War to finally bring it to life, and the platform has a ton of video game content on the horizon so it would make complete creative sense, but fingers crossed that Bautista gets his wish eventually in one form or another.
