Call of Duty wouldn't exist without Steven Spielberg (more on that later), but that connection wasn't enough to earn the legendary director the chance to helm the upcoming film adaptation. As reported byPuck News' Matt Belloni, Universal pitched Activision for the film rights to Call of Duty, with Spielberg attached to direct.
But, per Belloni, "with Spielberg comes the famous Spielberg Deal, which includes top-of-market economics, final cut, and full control over production and marketing. That spooked the team from Activision, now owned by Microsoft, which instead went with David Ellison’s pitch that offered much more control over the process."
So Call of Duty landed at Paramount, and the studio won't find a filmmaker as skilled as Spielberg to helm the adaptation. It won't find a filmmaker who understands CoD as well as he does, either. On the other hand, it will have no trouble finding a filmmaker willing to make a film that asks zero interesting questions about war and America's involvement in it. Spielberg wouldn't have obliged on that front.
Spielberg Is The Grandfather Of Call Of Duty
As noted in the Puck piece, "Spielberg is a big gamer and loves CoD in particular." That undersells his connection to the franchise a bit. Spielberg created Medal of Honor, the series of WW2-set first-person shooters that was incredibly popular in the early 2000s. After the success of the third game, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, much of the creative team split off and formed Infinity Ward, which then created the first Call of Duty team. Call of Duty is powered by knowledge that developers only acquired because of Spielberg.
With Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg set the gold standard for war films, but he also set the early paradigm for military shooters. Any game that includes a D-Day level (and CoD has multiple) is reacting — whether embracing, rejecting, or critiquing — to his portrayal of the storming of Omaha Beach.
Final Cut Is A Big Ask
No corporation wants to give an artist — however decorated, however gifted — full creative control. Activision wants to reduce the risk that its CoD film will offend anyone or make any big creative choices that might hamper its prospects at the box office or with future games. It thinks it can eliminate that risk from the project by hiring a director that it can control, one who won't demand final say on what the movie looks like.
But in the current market, where would-be blockbusters like The Flash, Borderlands, The Marvels, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny flop left and right, there's no guarantee that the CoD brand alone, artlessly adapted to film, is a guaranteed success.
That said, Activision's choice to reject Spielberg's offer is understandable. Spielberg has made increasingly haunted movies in the 21st century. The Fabelmans is a crowd-pleaser, but it's also about an artist's obsessive need to turn trauma into artistic work. His West Side Story begins with shots of a portion of the Sharks' and Jets' neighborhood reduced to rubble, demolished so that the Lincoln Center can be constructed, which will displace both gangs. Even his summer blockbusters, like Minority Report and War of the Worlds, have taken on a darker tone since 9/11. Though early Spielberg movies made light of war — like his WW2 comedy 1941 and the Nazis' portrayal as pulp villains in the Indiana Jones films — he found a more serious register with Schindler's List.
Munich Is Spielberg's Call Of Duty Movie
His war movies since 1993 (Saving Private Ryan, War Horse, Lincoln) have been serious, often dark. His 2005 drama Munich — which follows the Israeli taskforce assembled to assassinate the members of militant Palestinian group Black September, who killed 11 members of Israel's Olympic team in a terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics — comes close to Call of Duty's approach to modern warfare, with the Israeli agents often executing covert operations in urban areas.
In that way, Spielberg is a perfect fit. But in another way, Munich shows exactly why his take on Call of Duty would likely cause problems for Activision Blizzard. Munich doesn't take a side. It doesn't make the Israeli assassins look cool or justified in their pursuit of extrajudicial justice. It doesn't make the Black September terrorists look like one-note villains. It humanizes both, and ends with the assassins' leader, Avner Kaufman, disillusioned with his role in the operation.
Spielberg took pains to say that Munich was not anti-Israel — if you track down a DVD copy, there's even an intro video where he talks through the controversy around the film's portrayal of the country — but it wasboycotted by the Zionist Organization of America all the same. Spielberg isn't interested in making war movies without moral complexity. He wouldn't make a straightforwardly rah-rah, jingoistic CoD movie. He'd make something far more interesting. For what Activision Blizzard wants, it’s wise to keep him far away.
