Ruiner | Film adaptation coming, courtesy of Apes director

Share this Article:

The popular videogame Ruiner is the latest title to get turned into a film, with Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes' Wes Ball directing.

There’s little doubt that videogame to film adaptations are back on the Hollywood radar. Sony has created a whole division of its film studio to adapting its popular library of PlayStation games – both past and present – into big, crowd-pleasing movies. Elsewhere, Nintendo saw huge success last year with the release of The Super Mario Bros Movie.

Even Sega is getting in on the act: a report surfaced the other day that the former giant of the games industry was looking to grab yet another 1990s title, Eternal Champions, and turn it into a film. The company is also looking to make a Golden Axe animated series, and hopes to make other games based on its old IPs following the success of the Sonic The Hedgehog movies.

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes director Wes Ball, meanwhile, has already signed up to make a live action version of The Legend Of Zelda with Nintendo and Sony. That one is set to be a big budget fantasy epic that was announced by Nintendo last year in the wake of The Super Mario Bros Movie.

Wes Ball has previously described his Zelda project as “this awesome fantasy-adventure movie that isn’t like Lord Of The Rings, it’s its own thing,” also adding that he will be looking to reproduce the “wonder and whimsy” of “alive-action Miyazaki.”

According to a new report, once Ball is done with Zelda, he’s set for the harsh cyberpunk dystopia of Ruiner, another videogame adaptation that has just been announced in collaboration with Universal Pictures.

According to Variety, ‘the action shooter title is set in the year 2091 in the cyber metropolis Rengkok and follows a wired psychopath who fights against a corrupt system to uncover the truth and retrieve his kidnapped brother. Under the guidance of a mysterious hacker, he battles through a brutal world filled with cutting-edge technology and dark secrets throughout its neon-lit streets.’

It’s likely that Ball will be tackling Zelda first, and as such, Ruiner will probably be some way off. With the director of The Maze Runner now having a pretty busy slate for the next few years, we wonder what that means for any future films in The Planet Of The Apes series, given that Ball helmed the most recent entry.

Nothing has been publicly announced on that front but we’d imagine this deal makes Ball’s involvement less likely. You can catch Film Stories editor Simon Brew’s recent chat with Wes Ball on our podcast.

The annual Gamescom event last night incidentally also saw Deadpool director Tim Miller announce a huge new project with Amazon Studios that will convert lots of popular video game series into CGI episodes. More evidence if you need it, that studios are seeing this approach as one that will bring lots and lots of eyeballs. We’ll bring you more on Ruiner when we hear it.

Share this Article:

Wolf Man | First trailer lands for Blumhouse’s hairy horror
Leigh Whannell’s upcoming monster movie just got its first spooky teaser. Here’s the Wolf Man trailer. It feels like Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man has been in the making for a small eternity now, but finally, the first reels of footage have been unleashed on the internet. Universal Pictures has released the first teaser trailer for Whannell’s creature [...]
Wicked moves its release date, will now open against Gladiator 2
Jon M Chu’s musical adaptation Wicked has shifted its release date by five days, opening against Gladiator 2 in November. Universal has brought the release date of its upcoming musical adaptation Wicked forward by five days. The Jon M Chu-directed musical was supposed to open on 27th November, but the studio has now moved Wicked to [...]
Twisters blows away competition in North America
Lee Isaac Chung's tornado terror has overperformed in North America, even as it gets a more muted debut overseas. Giddy-up, tornado wranglers - Twisters is kicking up a storm, blowing everyone away, and delivering industry analysts the easiest day at the headline-writing office in some time. The film debuted stateside to an above-expectations $80.5m opening weekend, [...]
Ti West on MaXXXine’s shocking ending
Ti West’s MaXXXine is now in cinemas and we chatted to the director himself about the film’s ending. Warning! Spoilers for X and MaXXXine. Ti West concludes his X trilogy with MaXXXine, a genre-bending, steely 80s thriller that brings Maxine Minx’s story to an end. At the end of X, Pearl promised Maxine that she's going to end [...]
Thelma review | A no-action comedy with sweetness in spades
June Squibb’s delightful performance anchors a sweet comedy with heart to spare. Here’s our Thelma review. If we can add one plot point to the action movie cliché bible Sylvester Stallone keeps in his garage, let it be “phone scammers suck”. After the runaway success (in our eyes) of The Beekeeper earlier this year, writer-director Josh Margolin’s [...]