'Beyond Good And Evil' Movie: Adaptation Of Video Game Coming From 'Detective Pikachu' Director

After directing last year's Pokémon Detective Pikachu movie, director Rob Letterman is sticking in the world of video games for his next film.

A new report says Letterman will direct a Beyond Good and Evil movie for Netflix, which is based on Ubisoft's 2003 video game that's built a small cult following since its release.

The Hollywood Reporter has the news about Letterman's new project, and they say the film will be a hybrid of live-action and animation. Letterman makes sense as the director for a project with that style, since he comes from the world of animation and has directed three movies that heavily involve VFX mixing with live-action (2010's Gulliver's Travels, 2015's Goosebumps, and Detective Pikachu).

Here's the game's synopsis:

[Beyond Good and Evil] takes place in the 25th century on a remote mining planet that is under alien attack. The military rulers that promised to defend the population may be in league with the invaders. In this environment, a young photojournalist named Jade is recruited to be part of an underground resistance movement.

Here's the trailer for a remastered version of the game (which blatantly uses sound effects from Star Wars):

Unlike adaptations of games like Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell, or The Last of Us, this is an adaptation that absolutely no one was clamoring for. The original game performed pretty poorly when it was released in 2003, but over the years it has developed a small and vocal fanbase. Eventually, Ubisoft began developing a prequel game, Beyond Good and Evil 2, which was announced at E3 2017 but has yet to see the light of day.

Jason Altman and Margaret Boykin for Ubisoft Film & Television are producing this movie version, which is still searching for a writer to turn the sci-fi game into a proper movie script. Ubisoft, a video game company based in France, is responsible for games like Far Cry, Prince of Persia, and Rainbow Six, just to name a few, and about a decade ago, it launched a film and television division with the intention of overseeing any film adaptations and making sure they held true to the essence of the games. But the company's first swing out of the gate was 2016's Assassin's Creed, starring Michael Fassbender, and that movie crashed and burned. Hard. So far, that's the only film the company has produced, but there are adaptations of Tom Clancy's The Division, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Rabbids, Just Dance, and Werewolves Within in the works as we speak.