Steven DeKnight Has Talked To Sony About An R-Rated 'God of War' Movie

Pacific Rim Uprising director and Daredevil Season One showrunner Steven DeKnight wants to see a [...]

God of War

Pacific Rim Uprising director and Daredevil Season One showrunner Steven DeKnight wants to see a God of War movie come to life, whcih lead him to talking with Sony about a concept for an R-Rated adaptation of the video game.

DeKnight, whose Pacific Rim Uprising comes available on DigitalHD this week, talked with ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview, where he followed up his interest in a God of War movie which was originally revealed in a Twitter exchange. A big fan of the video game franchise, especially its most recent installment, DeKnight has put some thought into what it takes to adapt a video game into a high quality film.

"I would love to see it," DeKnight said. "Somebody had asked me about video games and I've always been a fan of God of War. I think the latest game was just so beautiful and phenomenal. I would love to tackle God of War movie or I would love to see somebody put that up on the big screen. Somebody asked me, 'Well, who would you have to have Kratos?' And immediately for me: Dave Batista would be the man. I think he can do anything. You can do drama, real emotion, humor, action. What would I like to see from a movie like that? A bit of a tricky question because there hasn't really been 100% success of translating a video game to a movie. It's a very, very tricky process."

DeKnight's Twitter conversation and idea of Dave Bautista in the role was well-received on social media, which might be what lead him to have a real conversation about possibly bringing the film to life.

"I had some early conversations with the good people at Sony PlayStation about it and my biggest thing is, look, you gotta approach it like a book," DeKnight said. "Approach it like adapting Jaws. For people who've read Jaws, the movie is very different but they're both fantastic. So you have to be able to take the source material and make it work as a movie. And I think that's part of the reason oftentimes video game movies don't work is because you can't translate the video game experience into a movie. You gotta take the characters and the situations and the emotions and make it work for a movie. Which means a lot of times you've got to change things, which is very dicey obviously because you don't want alienate video game fans, but you have to make a film that works within the context of a movie by itself. Very difficult. I would love to tackle it, I have no idea if that's going to happen. I'm not in any kind of conversations right now, but hopefully somebody will make a movie out of that franchise. I think it's a phenomenal franchise."

If he were ever to helm a God of War film, regardless of the liberties a movie would have to take by comparison to its video game counterpart, DeKnight knows it would "without a doubt" require an R-Rating to capture the essence of Kratos and his story.

"It's funny because when I sat down with the Sony PlayStation people, one of the first things we both said is R-rated because I always use the original Conan the Barbarian as my touchstone, that it needs to be R-rated," DeKnight said. "I don't think there's a way to tell that story and make it PG, nor should it be. And thankfully because of Deadpool, people are much more willing to try that R-rated there with genre work now, again. So, yeah, without a doubt R-rated. I mean not on as far as Spartacus, that was more NC-17, but definitely R-rated."

DeKnight's Pacific Rim Uprising is available on DigitalHD now and releases on blu-ray and DVD on June 19, 2018.

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