After the events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Anthony Mackie is officially playing the new Captain America. That’s quite the feather in his cap, but there’s always room for more. Deadline reports that Mackie will play the lead character in a TV adaptation of the Twisted Metal video game series, to be produced jointly by Sony Pictures Television and PlayStation Productions.
The first Twisted Metal game came out way back in 1995 and basically just told players, “Pick a car and blow up other cars.” How do you make a story out of that? Deadpool and Zombieland writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick had a pitch that tickled the executives at Sony: Mackie will play John Doe, a “motor-mouthed outsider” who must deliver a package on the other side of a wasteland full of people driving deadly, post-apocalyptic vehicles. That will surely include an ice cream truck driven by Sweet Tooth, the killer clown who’s become the franchise’s unofficial mascot over these past couple of decades.
“We’ve been big fans of Anthony’s phenomenal body of work over the years and knew he was the only actor who could play a character as complex, funny and compelling as John Doe,” said Sony exec Glenn Adilman. “Fortunately for us, he agreed.”
Twisted Metal is one of many new shows based on video games
There’s no word on when or where the Twisted Metal show might come out, but it’s just one of several upcoming TV shows being adapted from video games. There are shows based on Halo, The Last of Us, Fallout and more in various stages of production, and I expect that number to increase as video games get ever more popular.
So far as source material for Hollywood productions go, video games will soon be the new novel, mark my words!
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