Capcom's Upcoming Dark Void To Be Adapted To Film, Possibly As A Brad Pitt Vehicle

I'm not at all surprised to read that Dark Void, the upcoming video game from Capcom, will be adapted into a feature film. The first time I played the game, at Capcom's editor's day in early 2008, the game's filmic influences were obvious. There's a large dollop of The Rocketeer in there, as well as some Buck Rogers and a general sensibility inherited from '40s adventure films and serials. A movie almost had to happen. Now the first step has been taken.

THR reports that Reliance BIG Entertainment and Brad Pitt's company Plan B are developing the film. There aren't yet writers on board (get your pitches ready!) and at the moment it is just a potential Pitt vehicle. I'd be a bit surprised if he went for it — would be a highly physical role that I'd have expected to see him do ten years ago, but not so much now.

And these projects take quite a bit of time to percolate through development. The game isn't even released until January, and if it hits shelves and tanks, this deal might die quietly.

Here's the game's plot, via Wikipedia. Below that is video that shows off some of the design and action in the game. I've played enough at various game events to know that I quite like the action (development was handled by folks who worked on the last Crimson Skies game) but I don't know if the story is solid enough for a feature. Not that it couldn't be beefed up in the writing process.

The game's story will center around a cargo pilot named William Agustus Grey who crashes in the Bermuda Triangle. From there, he is teleported to a parallel universe where he encounters other humans, called Survivors. Together, Will and the survivors must battle an alien race known as the Watchers to return to Earth. The Watchers came from afar, making humans do their bidding, whilst being treated as gods. Eventually people known as Adepts emerged and banished the Watchers to the realm in which our pilot is trapped. With the help of Nikola Tesla, they retrofit Watcher technology to fight the Watchers.