The Death Stranding movie is still in the works, and while Hideo Kojima won’t be directing, he will be “deeply involved” in its making, he says.
Hideo Kojima’s affection for – and frequent allusions to – the medium of cinema hardly need to be rehashed here. And true to form, the Japanese video game auteur’s most recent project, Death Stranding, not only had a cinematic sense of scale and drama about it, but also featured a whole bunch of Kojima’s filmmaker buddies appearing in supporting roles, including Guillermo del Toro and Jordan Vogt-Roberts.
Logically enough, a film adaptation of 2019’s Death Stranding was announced in December last year, with Kojima and Alex Lebovici (Barbarian) listed as producers.
Although Kojima isn’t directing the film himself – something that he’s been open about for a while – he’s taken to Twitter to say that he’ll be “deeply involved” in the adaptation’s creative process.
“Just to be clear,” he wrote on Twitter on 18 June, “I am deeply involved in producing, supervising, plotting, look, design and content of the film adaptation of [Death Stranding], just not in charge of directing.”
Just to be clear, I am deeply involved in producing, supervising, plotting, look, design and content of the film adaptation of DS, just not in charge of directing.
— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) June 18, 2023
Little else is currently known about the film at present – who’ll actually be directing it hasn’t been announced, and neither is it clear whether the original game’s stars – including Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen – will have roles in the adaptation.
What is clear, though, is that the film won’t be a straight port of the post-apocalyptic delivery simulator’s plot. “I’m taking the approach of changing and evolving the world of Death Stranding in a way that suits the film well,” Kojima told IGN in December 2022. “I made Death Stranding to be a game, and games are games. There’s no real need to turn them into films. So in a way, the Death Stranding movie is taking a direction that nobody has tried before with a movie adaptation of a game.”
Sounds intriguing. Kojima’s next game project is, of course, also Death Stranding-related; a sequel is currently in the works at his studio, Kojima Productions.
