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Amidst Spider-Man Drama, Tom Holland’s ‘Uncharted’ Movie Loses Yet Another Director

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It has not been the best week for poor Tom Holland, with the young actor’s fate as the MCU’s Peter Parker up in the air as Disney and Sony spar over Spider-Man rights that as of right now, may kick the hero out of Disney’s famed cinematic universe. And Holland’s role, no matter how this plays out, is still unclear.

But Holland has to deal with even more drama, as after being cast as a young Nathan Drake in the eternally cursed Uncharted film, the movie has lost Dan Trachtenberg as its director. It’s, surprise, another Sony picture, and the studio is now trying to find a replacement, maintaining that production will still be starting early next year. Weirdly, rumor has it one of the “creative differences” Trachtenberg left over is that he wanted the character of Sully to be more true to the games than others involved were thinking.

Trachtenberg has previously directed 10 Cloverfield Lane and the pilot for the hit Amazon series, The Boys. He is the latest in a long line of names to depart the Uncharted movie at this point, as getting this thing made has been a saga that has spanned nearly a decade now. Trachtenberg is quite literally the fifth director to leave the project, following behind David O. Russell, Neil Burger, Seth Gordon, and Shawn Levy who were all previously attached. The only actor I remember being attached to play Nathan Drake before Holland was Mark Wahlberg in the David O. Russell era, despite an eternal fan push to get Firefly and Castle actor Nathan Fillion cast.

The switch to Holland as a younger Drake, paired with a younger Sully, seemed like it was finally going to be the ticket to get this thing made. And despite Trachtenberg’s departure, Sony is still going full steam ahead, just needing to scoop up a director.

Holland certainly has the charisma to be a young Nathan Drake, along with the parkour abilities, though it is naturally hard to imagine the end result of this film being all that great, given both its hilariously troubled production and the fact that by default, video game movies have about a 5-10% chance of being decent, and we are still on the hunt for an adaptation that is truly great. The best video game movies are not actually adaptations, but rather movies about video games like Ready Player One or Wreck-It Ralph. All these years later and people are still citing the original Resident Evil in 2002 as the “best” video game movie, which should tell you something.

Uncharted is a tricky project to begin with, as the games are already so cinematic that adapting them into film almost seems redundant. Reportedly this young Drake story is one we haven’t seen in the games. Sony is also supposedly working on getting a Last of Us movie made, that last I checked was looking at Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams to play Ellie, though I am still not clear on if that ever officially materialized, and the entire thing seems to be stuck in a similar circle of development hell that Uncharted has been for years.

Even if Tom Holland is having a bad week, I’m not too worried about him. I believe that Disney will end up doing whatever it takes to keep both Holland and Spider-Man in the MCU, even if that means easing up on their monetary demands, because they don’t want to be seen as losing. And Holland is an extremely talented actor, so even if the worst happens and he’s out as Peter, I expect he’ll have a long career ahead of him. Even if Uncharted…may not be his vehicle to post-Spidey success. But we’ll see.

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