The Guns of Navarone
The Great Escape
Goldfinger
2001: A Space Odyssey
Planet of the Apes (original)
The Deer Hunter
Dawn of the Dead
Full Metal Jacket
Predator
Die Hard
Heat
Black Hawk Down
Children of Men
Bourne Series
Casino Royale (with Daniel Craig)

Can we expect a movie adaptation in the same vein as these choices?

Hat tip to /Film

Kotaku recently spoke with Aki Saito — the fellow handling movie negotiations. When quizzed about Kojima’s involvement with the movie, he responded:

Hollywood has great respect for Mr. Kojima. They want to meet with him. Kojima will be acting as a producer, but we don’t know how involved he’ll be as a producer. Often Hollywood adaptations have the original game creator involved at the beginning, but somewhere along the line they fall out of view. This is why it’s very important for us to carefully pick the studio for this project.

Before adding that Paul Thomas Anderson was an interested director. This circulated the world wide web like some electronically fuelled wildfire. There was some speculation that the much less auspicious Paul W.S. Anderson (Alien Vs. Predator) had been mistaken for someone with talent. Luckily Collider stepped in to clarify:

I’ve emailed [movie] producer Mike De Luca and he said the rumor about Paul Thomas Anderson is “completely false and ridiculous.”

So that’s that.

Now for the trailer, brought to you by MGS Philanthropy:

Collider: So this is the question that every fan…I’m asking this for every fan…what are you going to do to finally make a kick-ass video game movie?

Mike De Luca: I mean, hopefully not screw it up.  For me adapting a video game is just like adapting a book or a play or any other…whenever you’re adapting from another medium for film you try to take into account what you need to do to make it a movie. 

With books it’s how you compensate for not being inside a character’s head and with video games I think what you have to compensate for is the loss of interactivity, you know.  What makes video games fun is that you get to be the character and you’re sitting there ruling the universe and it’s a really first person interactive experience.  When you’re in your theatre seat, you’re stuck with these subjective versions of the story and the game from a director or the writer’s point of view.  You can’t interact with what’s going on so whatever turns you on about the game, you’re immediately disadvantaged […]

So I think the bar is higher and I think in the past, people haven’t realized that they set the bar low for video game movies thinking that oh, there’s a built in audience and we don’t need to go crazy with this movie. […] [In Metal Gear Solid] the Cain and Able story between Solid Snake and Liquid Snake and their relationship with their father and the storyline of Metal Gear Solid 4 has the makings….there’s so much story in Metal Gear as opposed to other video games that I think it’s going to be a challenge but it’s an upscale problem to have so much thematic subtexts and story material to draw from, so I think we have a leg up already. It’s such a rich universe and Kojima is like George Lucas in terms of creating this universe so what it says about war by proxy in this kind of future where war has been outsourced to private companies I think can be almost very topical and also kind of satirical in like a “Robocop” kind of way, so I think if we can get a script that honors the storyline of all 4 games, but that also has a cinematic aesthetic you know the kind of aesthetic Verhoeven brought to “Robocop” or the kind of aesthetic the Wachowski’s brought to “The Matrix”.  If there’s a cinematic identity to the piece that exists on its own, it doesn’t conflict with the DNA of the game, you know that’s our goal is to pull off those 2 things.  Not mess with the DNA of the game but provide a movie that is an adaptation but that has it’s own cinematic identity so even if you don’t play the game you know, you’ll come out of that movie feeling like you did at the end of “The Matrix” or the end of “Robocop”.  That’s our goal anyway.

Collider: I guess that being said, have you thought […] $100 million movie—this is a summer blockbuster or this is going to be one of these mid-range kind of things?

Mike De Luca: No, they know it’s big.  I mean, we don’t want it to be crazy big but they know it’s big on the bigger side of things.

[…] This writer Kurt Wimmer is one of the people we’re looking at to talk to about pitching on it.
[…] Kurt is like one of many people we’re talking to about pitching us back a take on adapting the franchise. He hasn’t been hired or anything.

De Luca also mentioned an upcoming meeting with Kurt Wimmer, director and writer of Equilibrium. A number of fans have previously expressed a desire to involve him in the game to movie adaptation — they may yet get their wish. His involvement isn’t yet confirmed and we can only speculate as to his potential role.

In the latest edition of Nuts magazine ( UK ) there is an interview with Christian Bale, in which he states he‘s in the running to play Solid Snake in the 2009 movie Metal Gear Solid.

This is nothing more than a rumor at the moment, and Nuts isn’t well known for its newsworthiness. Let’s see how this one evolves.

Hayter has not been hired to script or produce the upcoming feature, should he have been, the film may have followed his intended direction, which was, “Metal Gear as the Apocalypse Now of the digital age, with Snake at the center of a swirling whirlpool of Genomic/military madness.”

A 90% majority vote at IGN believe omitting Hayter from the proceedings is a mistake.  Hayter has previously been involved with the screenplays of Brian Signer’s X-men and X2 and he is certainly experienced enough to do the job, coupled with a plentiful stash of MGS knowledge surely he’d be the perfect man for the job?

Source: IGN

Hideo Kojima : ‘It’s going to be a Hollywood film. It won’t be that German director [Uwe Boll]. Viggo Mortensen would make a perfect Snake, but maybe he’s a little too old. Metal Gear Solid, which was set in Alaska, would make a perfect setting for the movie.’

Source: Jeux France

I have taken the time to include this movie here because it illustrates the potential that an official Hollywood live action adaptation can achieve, when such high standard fan-made work can be created with the lowliest of budgets.

“After a full year’s efforts, a year full of patience and growth, The Hive Division is happy to share with all of our Internet friends the first trailer of Philanthropy. The project has been a part of our lives for more than four years, and in those four years, the aims that it represents and the dreams that it embodies have grown alongside us.
This trailer is an example of what we want to share with all of you who have followed us until now, you who have aspired as we have, as filmmakers, as videogame fans, or as individuals fascinated by the potential digital technology offers to anyone with a strong idea and a will brave enough to follow it.”