Erik is a writer based in Arizona. He’s written about video games and the entertainment industry for over a decade, and previously covered politics and culture. He also runs a Substack newsletter about entertainment and culture, a YouTube channel about these same topics and designs tabletop RPGs. He lives with his pack of three kids and three dogs in the mountains, and manages to find time to write inbetween daily chores. He was a 2014 nominee for a Shorty Award. His work has appeared in Forbes, The Atlantic, National Review, Mother Jones and elsewhere. He also writes poetry and fiction and has big dreams about writing scripts someday.

Movie adaptations of popular video games have largely failed to stick the landing over the years. Some call it a curse. You can trace the critical and box office failures all the way back to 1993’s Super Mario Bros. movie, starring Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi, Nintendo’s famous plumbers. With a 28% Rotten Tomatoes score, it remains one of the worst-reviewed video game movies of all-time, though some fans and critics have warmed to it over the years. The Street Fighter movie that came out the following year bombed even harder, landing an 11% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. (Fortunately, the upcoming Street Fighter movie looks really good).

Whatever lifted the curse, it’s made video game adaptations of popular franchises a great deal more palatable to movie studios and producers — and there’s no better video game to make into a blockbuster action movie than Call of Duty, the best-selling video game franchise nearly every year.

Taylor Sheridan Has Basically Made a ‘Call of Duty’ Movie Already

We learned recently that Steven Spielberg was reportedly in talks to direct the Call of Duty movie, though he allegedly wanted full creative control of the project. Instead, Paramount landed the rights to the wildly popular first-person shooter franchise and announced that Yellowstone creator, Taylor Sheridan, would team up with director Peter Berg on the film. Sheridan will co-write the script with Berg, and Berg will direct.

But it’s another film that makes me confident that Call of Duty is in good hands: the 2015 action crime thriller, Sicario, directed by Denis Villeneuve. The film is about as close to a Call of Duty campaign as it gets.

‘Sicario’ Is the Perfect Template For ‘Call of Duty’ On the Big Screen

Sicario’s story is actually a lot like a Call of Duty campaign. It’s a heart-pounding, action-packed film filled with tense gunfights, machine gun-toting special ops soldiers, plot twists, betrayals, and plenty of suspense.

The mission Macer finds herself on is nothing like she expected, and by the end of the film she’s disillusioned, furious, and more than a little traumatized. It’s grim, but it’s exactly the kind of story you’d find in a Call of Duty campaign — only better. The film’s sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, brings ISIS terrorists into the mix. There’s a mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II‘s campaign that reminded me a lot of these films when I played the game back in 2022. It would not surprise me to learn that Infinity Ward took inspiration from Sicario. The game even has a character named Alejandro and another named Graves — just one letter away from Graver. It appears we are coming full circle.

Lioness stars Zoe Saldaña as Joe McNamara, a CIA agent who runs the Lioness program, training women as special ops operators who infiltrate dangerous organizations around the globe. It has all the bombastic military action fans would want in a Call of Duty film.

While it’s hard to imagine how Sheridan will find time to actually add more projects to his extremely busy schedule, between Sicario and Lioness, it appears Call of Duty is in very good hands. I’m not a fan of everything Sheridan puts out, but he’s the perfect choice for a big, over-the-top military thriller.

As a side-note, I’d love to see Steven Spielberg make a WW2-themed Call of Duty in the future. While there are no details around the upcoming film’s plot, I suspect it will take place in the Modern Warfare timeline. If you’re looking for a TV show that also feels a lot like a Call of Duty campaign, check out The Terminal List: Dark Wolf starring Taylor Kitsch and Tom Hopper. It’s surprisingly good.