After ‘Twisted Metal,’ 12 Other Video Game Adaptations En Route to TV
Peacock’s new series Twisted Metal might get gamers to turn off their PlayStations and switch HDMI inputs.
The half-hour action TV show stars Anthony Mackie as a “motor-mouthed outsider offered a chance at a better life, but only if he can successfully deliver a mysterious package across a post-apocalyptic wasteland,” Peacock says.
Helping this John Doe on his journey is a “badass ax-wielding car thief,” played by Stephanie Beatriz. But hindering the duo are “savage marauders driving vehicles of destruction and other dangers of the open road, including a deranged clown who drives an all-too-familiar ice cream truck,” played by Joe Seanoa and voiced by Will Arnett.
Before Twisted Metal was a TV show, however, it was a video game franchise that had sold 5 million copies in North America less than five years after its 1995 debut. And hit video games often become hit TV shows — e.g. Netflix’s The Witcher, Paramount+’s Halo, and HBO’s The Last of Us.
With Twisted Metal now on the small screen, here are a dozen video games that could soon follow suit.
Alan Wake
This 2010 action-adventure game — featuring a thriller novelist trying to solve his wife’s disappearance — has a TV adaptation in development, as writer Sam Lake revealed in a 12th anniversary video last year. “AMC, the wonderful, wonderful home for absolutely brilliant TV shows, has bought the rights for Alan Wake,” Lake said. “And we have been collaborating on making a TV show happen.”
Assassin’s Creed
In 2020, Netflix announced that it was adapting the Assassin’s Creed franchise — video games about a centuries-spanning conflict between the Assassin Brotherhood and the Knights Templar — for the small screen in an Ubisoft partnership that will “tap into the iconic video game’s trove of dynamic stories with global mass appeal for adaptations of live action, animated, and anime series,” per The Verge.
Devil May Cry
Adi Shankar, a producer of Netflix’s Castlevania, is working on bringing Devil May Cry, a hack-and-slash franchise centering on a demon hunter named Dante, to television. “The Season 1 scripts are done,” Shankar told IGN Japan in 2021. “They are rad. I could not be more excited.”
Fallout
Walton Goggins (The Righteous Gemstones) has been cast in a Prime Video adaptation of this hit video game franchise, which is set in a retro-futuristic world decimated by nuclear war. Westworld’s Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are executive-producing the adaptation, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Gears of War
Netflix announced last year that this sci-fi shooter franchise, a massive hit for Xbox, will the be the basis for an upcoming film and animated series with “potential more stories to follow,” as Variety reported at the time. The series tracks a war between humans and the humanoid Locust Horde on the planet Sera.
God of War
Producers of The Expanse and The Wheel of Time are teaming up to give Prime Video an adaptation of this hit PlayStation franchise — an action-adventure series following Spartan warrior Kratos and his conflicts with Greek and Norse gods — as Deadline touted in 2022.
Grounded
Obsidian Entertainment announced in 2022 that an animated adaptation of Grounded was afoot, adding, “The series will exist in the same universe as the game, where the mundane becomes fantastical, and will follow four friends who have been shrunk down to the size of ants during the summer before they go to high school. … These teens will need to figure out how to survive in a familiar yet utterly foreign environment that is the backyard.”
Horizon Zero Dawn
Netflix has tapped The Umbrella Academy’s Steve Blackman and Michelle Lovretta for an adaptation of this futuristic open-world game, in which a young hunter named Aloy may be the key to understanding what apocalypse befell our present-day society and why machines inherited the earth, per Deadline.
Knuckles
Idris Elba is reprising his voice role from the big-screen Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in an upcoming Paramount+ series that also hosts the talents of Adam Pally, Edi Patterson, Julian Barratt, Scott Mescudi, and Ellie Taylor, Variety reports. The echidna Knuckles has been a fixture of the Sonic video game franchise for nearly 30 years.
Pokémon
In 2021, Variety reported that Netflix was in early development on a live-action Pikachu series from Lucifer co-showrunner Joe Henderson. The “pocket monsters” of the ever-popular Nintendo franchise previously joined live-action humans in the 2019 film Detective Pikachu.
Splinter Cell
The Assassin’s Creed project isn’t the only Netflix–Ubisoft collaboration in the works. The two companies have also put the gears in motion for an anime adaptation of this Tom Clancy video game series about a black-ops division of the NSA, as Variety reported in 2020. Derek Kolstad, creator of the big-screen John Wick franchise, is an executive producer on the project.
Tomb Raider
This January, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Phoebe Waller-Bridge was working on a Prime Video show based on this video game series about archaeologist Lara Croft, previously portrayed on screen by Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander.
