A24 has confirmed that they will be making a film version of 2019 open world game Death Stranding.
As shared by Okami13, A24 revealed the news on their website with this message:
“It’s official: we’ve partnered with Kojima Productions on the live-action feature film adaptation of Hideo Kojima’s acclaimed video game, DEATH STRANDING.”
Of course, as befitting a Kojima Productions project, they made this announcement on the A24 shop, and links to the sales page for an official A24 x Kojima Productions Death Stranding Logo Tee.
Death Stranding was Kojima Productions’ first game, after Hideo Kojima was unceremoniously ousted at Konami, and he had to rebuild his studio, partly with some Konami employees who went with him.
While the game received mostly positive reviews, it also faced a lot of criticism, for being drastically different from the Metal Gear Solid games Kojima was known for. I arguably remains a genre of its own, but other criticisms include obtuse mechanics and a not entirely satisfying game loop.
Still, it remained one of the most critically acclaimed games on the year of its release, earning the 2019 The Game Awards GOTY. Publisher 505 Games also cited that it sold 5 million copies across PlayStation 4 and PC as of July 2021.
Most recently, Kojima released a Death Stranding Director’s Cut, which addressed many of the issues critics had with the title. So, there should be no remaining dispute if these issues should have just been accepted as part of the game, or if Kojima could fix them and keep the game’s identity.
There is also the trope of Death Stranding predicting the ongoing pandemic, although Kojima assures fans that he had not anticipated anything. In any case, whether you liked this game or not, it’s clear that it’s been successful and famous enough for Hollywood to be interested in an adaptation.
We already knew about a Death Stranding film going in production last year, under Hammerstone Studios, with Kojima working alongside Hammerstone owner Alex Lobovici and Allan Ungar.
We had also reported on the then-nascent project, which Kojima described as not a retelling of the game’s story, but will instead be “taking a direction that nobody has tried before with a movie adaptation of a game.”
Now, it just so happens that Alex Lobovici’s Hammerstone Studios was one of the five production companies that worked on 2022 A24 hit, Barbarian. In fact, that film release three months before the original Death Stranding film announcement.
So, we may not have noticed it then, but Kojima may have already agreed to make the Death Stranding film with A24 as early as last year, and we just didn’t put the pieces together yet
