Legendary Pictures has scooped up the classic dungeon-crawling video game Diablo for adaptation into a feature-length motion picture. This news comes from Cinematical, one of whose writers noticed that Legendary's website currently lists the project as "In Development."
Legendary Pictures is the studio behind 300, which would have been the best game-to-film adaptation ever if it weren't for the fact that the property wasn't a video game until after the movie was made. The studio also gave us the franchise reboots of Superman and Batman and is currently handling the sequels for each. Other upcoming projects for Legendary include 10,000 B.C., Where the Wild Things Are and a move based on the Warcraft computer game.
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Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo was first released for home computers in late-1996. In the first game (there was a subsequent expansion pack and sequel), players led a lone hero through his or her quest to overthrow Diablo, the Lord of Terror, whose minions have staged an assault on the town of Tristram. The entire story is based within the world of Sanctuary, in which a war between Heaven and Hell has broken out. The game follows the player-controlled hero as he or she descends into the depths of the netherworld to stave off the demon attack and, eventually, take down Diablo himself. There's been no word on whether Legendary's adaptation with follow the story of the first.
As a studio, Legendary Pictures has certainly positioned itself to make plenty of friends within geek and gamer culture. Their deft handling of the Batman franchise continues to score big points and 300 was equal amounts visual masterpiece and quality filmmaking with its distinctly game-like feel. The upcoming Where the Wild Things Are also gets plenty of geek cred, with the visionary young director Spike Jonze in the director's chair. And while Warcraft and Diablo will be the studio's first official forays into the world of game-to-film adaptations, its previous and ongoing works clearly points to a company which understands the cultural aspect of demographics.
I'll be watching this one closely. The time is long overdue for a quality game-to-film adaptation. I had originally thought that Peter Jackson would be the first one to get there with his producer's role in Halo, but that project stalled out some time ago. As we all learned yesterday, a Halo motion picture is moving closer to becoming a reality, but it's still a long way off.
