According to Deadline, Prime Video is in negotiations for a live-action God of War series, based on the popular video game. That’s enough to make a lot of ears prick up in curiosity—but it gets better. The adaptation is said to come from a powerhouse pairing of showrunners: The Expanse‘s Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, and Wheel of Time‘s Rafe Judkins, working with Sony Pictures Television and PlayStation Productions.
It’s practically unfair how tantalizing that possibility is.
Everything is still very “maybe” and “possibly” and “in development,” and Deadline notes that neither Sony nor Amazon would comment. But video game adaptations are cropping up everywhere right now, from Paramount Plus’s Halo series (premiering later this month) to the highly anticipated Last of Us adaptation coming to HBO Max. Peacock has Twisted Metal in the works, and Amazon already has Fallout and is developing a Mass Effect series. It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising for a series as popular as God of War to be next.
Created by Santa Monica Studio, the God of War series began in 2005 and now consists of almost a dozen games; the latest, God of War Ragnarok (pictured above), is due out later this year. In the first game, the ex-Spartan soldier Kratos seeks to defeat Ares, the god of war, for complicated reasons (as is generally the case where Greek gods are concerned). As the series goes on, the games extend from Greek mythology into Norse, and Kratos becomes a god, learns secrets of his history, has a kid, and does a lot of very dramatic mythological god stuff. Various games from the series often appear on lists of the best PlayStation games, and a GameSpy review of the first game raved, “It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then a game is released that’s so outstanding that all kinds of gamers must play it regardless of their genre preferences.”
With millions of copies of the games sold, God of War has a built-in audience; with Judkins, Ostby, and Fergus on board, it has a stellar creative team that knows now to navigate complex adaptations set in beloved fictional worlds. Now we just have to see if this one makes it past the development stage.
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