The world of movies and video games have been very closely linked, but now with the advent of higher-budget television shows, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to use television as a vehicle for adapting a large-scale gaming experience.
According to Deadline, that man is one of Iceland’s premiere filmmakers, Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband), and his video game of choice is the massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) EVE Online made by CCP Games with plans to produce a television show in that world with his production company RVK.
According to the story, the television venture will be “an original concept set 20,000 in the future within the interstellar EVE Online universe in which rival societies are trapped in the same space by a collapsed wormhole and characters from five warring factions battle it out in space ships.”
To keep the players of the game involved, the series will take inspiration from user-sourced stories posted on the EVE Online website.
For many years, Kormákur was mainly known for his prolific output of Icelandic films including 101 Reykjavik and Jar City, but he found a fan in Mark Wahlberg who helped to transform the Icelandic crime thriller Reykjavik-Rotterdam into the 2011 breakout hit Contraband. That went so well they’ve reteamed for the upcoming crime-thriller 2 Guns, bringing Denzel Washington along for the ride. That comes out August 2.
Kormákur is currently in Hungary filming The Missionary and hopes to get moving on a Christian Bale movie called Everest for Universal and Working Title. (Doug Liman also has a movie of that title in the works.)
As luck would have it, there was a huge event in Iceland four days ago surrounding EVE Online, covered by our good friend Adam Rosenberg of Digital Trends, just to give you some idea what a huge phenomenon this is.
You can read about that here.
