After many years, numerous attempts, and even the likes of Steven Spielberg wanting to have a crack at it, Paramount is now fully underway in getting a “Call of Duty” live-action adaptation off the ground as a movie that will no doubt require ear plugs to come with your popcorn. One thing the studio needs to be concerned about now, however, is finding the right person to make the story accessible to diehard gamers and non-players alike.

Directors have come and gone trying to take a pass at “Call of Duty,” with no success. But Paramount might already have the perfect man for the job. After some excellent films that he’s either penned or directed himself and a plethora of programming to stream, all involving either gruff cowboys, gangsters, or globe-trotting war heroes, Taylor Sheridan feels like the perfect fit to shepherd this franchise. In fact, he isn’t just one of the best choices to tackle “Call of Duty,” he should be the only one on the list, and we have five good reasons why he should be calling the shots when turning one of the biggest video game franchises in the world into a movie that has the potential to be a huge hit.

When creating a hero for a Taylor Sheridan show, it’s best to give them anger issues that they channel into the numerous (and often deadly) altercations they find themselves in, all because of the dark past they very rarely talk about. Coincidentally, that’s almost the exact same criteria required for anyone that players have fought as or besides throughout the Call of Duty franchise. Characters like Soap McTavish, Captain Price, or the mysterious Ghost have histories dense enough to cover a cereal box, and frankly, that’s all they need. It’s also why Sheridan would be a perfect fit to bring any of these hard-as-nails heroes to life when “Call of Duty” makes it to the big screen.

Not to offend any fans of the games, but the first-person shooter franchise has thrived off of set pieces, not story beats. Sheridan, however, could find a sweet spot for the “Call of Duty” movie by paying just enough attention to both. By hinting at their history while they’re plugging bad guys with bullets, he could turn some of the game’s most beloved characters into the Rip Wheelers of the battlefield. Whatever film comes our way, it doesn’t need to be a thought-provoking war movie, but a popcorn-chugging action-fest that Sheridan could deliver without breaking a sweat, or if he’s feeling brave, expand into something with a touch of complexity.

Of the nine shows Sheridan has put on the air that have either run their course or have yet to reach the end, three of them are all set in the same world across a timeline stretching over 100 years, with more in the making. It’s thanks to “1883,” “1923,” and “Yellowstone” that Sheridan has proven he has the capability to map out a world that in some cases bounces around in time, just as the Call of Duty franchise has been known to do.

Whether it’s diving into robotic warfare or exploring some of the greatest conflicts in history, “Call of Duty” has changed with the times out of necessity, and presented different eras inhabited by different characters. This is the kind of terrain where Sheridan could flourish, fleshing out worlds and using a bit of extra firepower to do it. Plus, some of the projects he’s already made have acted a soft inspiration for some blockbuster levels in previous installments of the Call of Duty franchise.

Some of the greatest moments in Call of Duty history have been when the games have unapologetically ripped off action sequences from well-known action movies. “Black Hawk Down,” “The Rock,” and even “Cliffhanger” have all made their way into some of the campaign and multiplayer maps in Call of Duty’s 22-year-long history. At one point, though, the game looked to Taylor Sheridan’s work in the Denis Villeneuve-directed crime thriller “Sicario” for inspiration.

The “Santa Seña Border Crossing” map from 2022’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” while massively disliked, mirrored the intense scene at the border in the 2015 film, with the campaign section also seeing characters taking on drug cartels as well. The links between the game and the film don’t stop there, either, as back in 2018, when one of the billion attempts were being made to bring Call of Duty to theaters, “Sicaro 2: Day of the Soldado” director Stefano Sollima was tasked with adapting the video game franchise before things fell apart. Now, with Paramount getting hold of the IP, perhaps the smartest move would be to hand the reins over to the man that’s been such an important influence on the franchise to take it from here, instead. After all, it’s not like he’s led the company wrong so far.

At this point, Taylor Sheridan could put his name on just about any script and it feels likely that Paramount would back him. Besides the nine television shows he has under his belt and the batch of others that are on the way, there really is no stopping the dude behind the Duttons to expand his dominance on Paramount mountain. The studio trusts him implicitly. With that in mind, it feels like a smart way to ensure a hit with a “Call of Duty” movie might be to put “From the Creator of ‘Yellowstone'” in the marketing materials.

Whatever Sheridan scribbled down wouldn’t have to be bound tightly to the history of the first-person shooter, anyway. Plenty of recent video game adaptations have thrived because they’ve veered away from the source material (“Fallout,” “Sonic the Hedgehog”). And if the studio needed a proof of concept, Sheridan’s most recent action-packed series made the best argument for why he can handle a blockbuster action movie with soldiers on top secret missions and yelling cool lines at each other during gun fights.

After breaking away from Yellowstone ranch, letting the “Tulsa King” rule his kingdom, and making sure the “Mayor of Kingstown” does … whatever it is he does (something with prisons?), one of Sheridan’s biggest successes of late has been the Zoe Saldaña-led action show, “Lioness.” Recently renewed for a third season, the show follows Saldaña as the head of the “Lioness Engagement Team,” which is comprised of female undercover operatives that are tasked with infiltrating high priority targets before taking them down. (Naturally, Sheridan has also managed to squeeze a role in for himself as Cody Spears.)

The very first episode validates that Sheridan is the perfect person for a “Call of Duty” movie. In an effort to extract an operative, Saldaña’s Joe McNamara is calling in air strikes against small army invasions and sending in squads via helicopter to pull her soldier out. It’s pulse-pounding stuff that would get fans of the beloved video game franchise itching to drop in on a game. That’s exactly the kind of impact a video game adaptation should be aiming for, and if Sheridan managed to do that in the first five minutes of a TV episode, imagine what he’d be capable of with an entire movie to play around in.

At this point, Paramount must be running out of space for any more titles from television show-making machine Taylor Sheridan. While “Yellowstone” might have drawn to a close, he still has the spin-offs lined up along with the likes of standalone titles, “Landman,” “Lioness,” “Tulsa King,” and “Mayor of Kingstown” nicely ticking along as well. Of course, television isn’t the only space Sheridan has occupied. Some of his best stories have been on the big screen instead of the small.

Before we even knew who John Dutton was and what it meant to be “taken to the train station,” Taylor Sheridan was making a name for himself writing movies before really having a go at directing them. As with his television output, there have been some weak misses and some massive hits among the movies, and some you might be surprised he even played a part in helping create. Here’s the ranking of every Taylor Sheridan movie project to which he has a writing or directing credit attached, beginning with his first time behind the camera when he dared to dabble in the horror genre.

Every director has to begin somewhere, and for Taylor Sheridan, it was in a genre miles away from where he’d eventually find his footing. “Vile” is his only dip into horror, and we should be thankful for that. A ropey watch from beginning to end, this “Saw” replica cuts like a rolling pin as a group of friends finds themselves trapped in a house with six other strangers and are forced to torture each other to survive. Trust us when we say you, the viewer, are the only one who’ll genuinely suffer.

Shot on a shoestring with some dreadful performances to support it, “Vile” doesn’t necessarily live up to its name, but if the camera sits still long enough, it can be an eye-rolling watch at times. While Sheridan might’ve stitched some wince-inducing moments into his stories in the years that followed, the ones he handles here lack any kind of terror. In a Rotten Tomatoes interview, he described “Vile” as “an excellent opportunity to point a camera and learn some lessons that actually benefited me on ‘Wind River,'” the film he deems his true directorial debut. With that in mind, we can just be glad that whatever nuggets of knowledge he took from “Vile” put him leagues ahead of where he started.

Though he might have been up to his cowboy boots in building his “Yellowstone” universe, Taylor Sheridan helped Paramount flesh out another film in 2021, co-writing with Will Staples an adaptation of the 1993 Tom Clancy novel “Without Remorse.” The film sees Michael B. Jordan as John Kelly, a U.S. Navy SEAL and eventual leader of the fictional special forces team, Rainbow Six. In Clancy’s books, Kelly (later renamed Clark) is a recurring ally of Jack Ryan, who had been brilliantly rebooted on Amazon Prime Video by this point. The streaming service nabbed the movie from Paramount, releasing it during the pandemic to tee up another franchise, but unfortunately it doesn’t start with a great introduction.

“Without Remorse” has all the tools to be a hit but feels dated and frustratingly dull with the story it’s spinning. Sheridan, who is no stranger to handling heroes with vengeance on their mind, plays this far too by the book as Jordan’s hero aims to settle a score after his pregnant wife and members of his team are murdered. Directed by Stefano Sollima, the film lacks the same energy and suspense that audiences were otherwise binging on with “Jack Ryan” and other Sheridan projects by that time. Even the movie’s final big shootout is considerably stale and fails to make a case for what was supposed to be Jordan’s all-new franchise. As of 2023, “John Wick” director Chad Stahelski is set to helm the sequel, “Rainbow Six,” and will hopefully give Kelly the jolt that Sheridan and Sollima simply couldn’t.

Whereas “Without Remorse” fights to break free of ’90s clichés, “Those Who Wish Me Dead” proudly owns them, making for a fun, old-fashioned cat-and-mouse movie starring Angelina Jolie. Besides directing this one, Taylor Sheridan has a co-writing credit alongside Charles Leavitt and novelist Michael Koryta, who wrote the book from which the film is adapted. Jolie plays a heroic smokejumper (initial wildfire responder) who takes a stranded young boy under her protection from two hitmen (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult), hoping to cover their tracks from a job gone wrong.

Running on the fumes of films like “Hard Rain” and “Cliffhanger,” “Those Who Wish Me Dead” really doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and is all the better for it. Aiden Gillen, who filled a corner of the market for lethal and logistical bad guys thanks to “Game of Thrones” (and would later be in villain mode for Sheridan’s own “Mayor of Kingstown”), does what’s needed. Nicholas Hoult, meanwhile, has an early stab at being a bad guy, which works as an okay warm-up act for whatever he has in store in “Superman” as Lex Luthor. They don’t make them like this anymore, but it’s great to see Sheridan keeping the fire burning for them with this entertaining watch.

After such a massive hit with “Sicario,” it was hardly a surprise that Taylor Sheridan would deliver a second chapter revisiting that world, narrowing his focus even more on Benicio del Toro’s steely-eyed killer, Alejandro Gillick. In “Sicario: Day of the Soldado,” del Toro’s hitman is sent across the border once more following a terrorist attack in Kansas City that links back to Mexican drug cartels. Just as before, our heartless hero is laser-focused on his mission, until he draws in a young bystander to this dark and lawless land along the way.

While it’s a decent follow-up mapped out by Sheridan, there’s no doubt that “Day of the Soldado” lacks Denis Villeneuve’s brilliant direction and Roger Deakins’ haunting cinematography, which filled every frame of its predecessor. The only winning element is del Toro, trying but not entirely elevating the film to the heights of what came before, no matter how cool he might look gunning down crime bosses.

Director Stefano Sollima bravely fills the chair as Villeneuve’s stand-in (when Sheridan might have been a better option), trying to lend a hand in what feels like the “Yellowstone” creator’s attempt at big-screen world-building. Since then, producers have promised a third movie is in development while Sheridan has been busy making a dynasty out of the Duttons, but the wait has been a long one. For now, there’s no ETA on when Gillick will return but given how deathly silent he often is, we’ll never hear him coming anyway.

In Taylor Sheridan’s film and television projects, some of his best work often features a perfectly matched pair at the center. For “Hell or High Water,” which Sheridan penned for director David Mackenzie, Chris Pine and Ben Foster are just such a double act. Toby (Pine) and Tanner Howard (Foster) are brothers who start robbing banks in order to hold on to the family home. Unfortunately, hot on their tail and handling one last case is Jeff Bridges’ seasoned Texas Ranger, Marcus Hamilton.

It might carry classic tropes of some superior heist movies, but Sheridan still manages to add his familiar tone and unflinching management of mortality to a thriller cooking in the West Texas sun. Bridges delivers the classic model of the perma-frowning lawman close to retirement, even with a trustworthy partner along for the ride (the always-welcome Gil Birmingham). However, the one place that he plays with the formula in particular is with the Howards themselves.

Foster, who has often stepped in as the short fuse in films like “3:10 to Yuma” and “Alpha Dog,” is just as unpredictable here but often equally as chilled as his on-screen sibling from Pine. Their chemistry is encapsulated perfectly in a memorable trip to the gas station as Toby lets rip on a pair of naive thugs while Tanner doesn’t even leave the car. When listing the best heist movies of all time like “Heat,” “The Town,” and “Point Break,” “Hell or High Water” easily deserves to steal some time in the conversation.

The 2017 film “Wind River” is undoubtedly Taylor Sheridan’s best example of handling the double duty of writing and directing, culminating in a simple but sinister detective story. Elizabeth Olsen is an FBI agent sent to handle the murder case of an 18-year-old girl and member of the Northern Arapaho tribe on the Wind River Indian Reservation. Joining her on the hunt is U.S. Wildlife Service Agent Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), who has a dark past that he’s forced to revisit. Together, both find themselves on the trail of a grisly cover-up, a pulse-pounding shoot-out, and a cold but tearful bit of justice being paid at the end of it all.

While its final act rests on an unsettling flashback, there’s no doubt that Sheridan masterfully builds mountains of tension getting there in this sub-zero detective story, with Olsen and Renner putting in the work. By this point, both stars had already established a flawless dynamic thanks to their work together in the MCU as Hawkeye and the Scarlet Witch. Here, the film lingers on emotional scenes that are only strengthened when they handle them individually. Olsen delivers a commendable Clarice Starling-like performance as the brave woman in a man’s world, but Renner offers what might be some of his best work as a father dealing with grief in his own way. By the time the truth in “Wind River” gets out, you’ll have chewed your fingers to the bone if they haven’t been frozen off already.

The best film from Taylor Sheridan might not be one he directed, but it’s the movie that put his name on the map more than anything else, and rightfully so. Under the impeccable direction of Denis Villeneuve, who was another up-and-comer at the time, Taylor Sheridan’s “Sicario” delivered a cold-blooded blockbuster that perfectly merged both artists’ handling of unforgiving terrain and gripped its audience from beginning to end.

Boasting an outstanding selection of talents, including Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and an early appearance from Daniel Kaluuya, the greatest asset in “Sicario” is Benicio del Toro as the terrifyingly cool Alejandro Gillick. As the titular assassin, or “Sicario,” in this murky battle against drugs and gang warfare, Gillick is the immovable, stone-faced killer from which many of Sheridan’s future characters would be cut.

When del Toro’s killer steps into a scene, a chilling atmosphere comes with him, making him something to be feared and fascinated by for both the audience and Blunt’s Kate Macer, who “is lost in a land of wolves.” Play that out in the searing cinematography from Roger Deakins and one of the greatest gunfights in cinema history and “Sicario” is still Taylor Sheridan’s finest work, even if someone else called the shots.