Though he broke through with video game documentary The King Of Kong, Seth Gordon’s resulting career has so far been largely limited to comedies such as **Horrible Bosses **and Identity Thief. Now Sony could be about to change that, as the studio is negotiating to have him tackle the adaptation of **Uncharted.
The PlayStation game series has been a tough nut to crack cinematically for years now. Originally targeted as the possible launching point for a film franchise in 2009, Kyle Ward was hired to work on a script that would adapt Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.
A year later, the big news was that David O. Russell, a man not previously known as a would-be game adaptor, had signed on to give it a whack, with his then-favourite leading man, Mark Wahlberg lined up as Nathan Drake. "The idea that really turns me on is that there's a family that's a force to be reckoned with in the world of international art and antiquities," Russell said at the time. "They deal with heads of state and heads of museums and mete out justice. We'll have the family dynamic, which we've done in a couple of movies now, and then you take that and put it on the bigger, more muscular stage of an international action picture, but also put all the character stuff in it. That's a really cool idea to me."
There was much excited chatter at the notion that Wahlberg and Russell were bringing Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro aboard, but then it all went very quiet until talk broke of Russell’s frustration with the film’s development and he left in 2011.
Fast-forward to 2012, and National Treasure** scribblers Marianne and Cormac Wibberly were brought in, with Neil Burger briefly attached, only for the director to ditch it for Divergent.
So now Gordon looks to be the man charged with getting Nathan Drake’s quest for the lost treasure of El Dorado to our screens, working from a script re-written by Safe House’s David Guggenheim. Let’s hope it makes it to production this time…