Netflix's "Gears of War" Movie Adaptation Gets Promising Update

Netflix's Gears of War adaptation is one of the most highly-anticipated projects on the giant streamer's slate.

“Gears of War” is one of the biggest Xbox video game franchises of all time and a key intellectual property for Microsoft. 

It was released exclusively on the Xbox 360 in 2006 and followed a team of soldiers called Delta Squad fighting against the Locust Horde, a subterranean alien race that decimates humanity.

The main crew consisted of Marcus Fenix, Dominic “Dom” Santiago, Augustus Cole, and Damon Baird. They used a variety of heavy-duty firearms, rocket launchers, and lancers — which are rifles with chainsaws attached to them — to dispatch the Locust swarms.

In an interview with Collider, Netflix's Head of Film, Scott Stuber, has a personal stake in the success of the project and added that he was keen to get to work on adapting the Xbox classic.

Stuber admitted that the strikes have slowed down progress, but that work was fully underway on the project. He was attached as a producer for a Gears of War movie at Universal in 2016 and has kept a keen eye on the project ever since. 

The movie was then acquired by Netflix, with Dave Bautista publicly enthusiastic about leading the movie, and entered development in November 2022. 

It has tapped Dune writer Jon Spaihts to pen the screenplay, while Bautista—who worked alongside Spaihts on Dune—has pitched himself for the role of Marcus Fenix, and has been desperate to take on the role, having already lent his likeness to the character in the video games themselves.

Stuber explained: "Gears of War I was the producer on when I was a producer, so to bring it full circle has been great for me to get back together with the guys at Microsoft. So those are two really big ones that I feel aspirationally. There are huge audiences. As you know, that kind of medium, they don't translate always, and historically, as an industry, we've screwed it up quite a bit. But both those have really rich worlds, have really good characters, so they're very natural kind of transitions to screen and filmmaking."

When asked if they had scripts yet for Gears of War and their upcoming BioShock adaptation, Stuber revealed "We haven't even got them," Before going on to say, "We've done long treatments. [T]here's a lot of people that we wanna make sure feel good. Inevitably, when you're making those, first and foremost, you gotta make sure the fan base is good, right? So you're working with the creators, you're working with the teams who make the games. We've worked out a lot of that, so now we've got great writers, and I feel like, hopefully, we'll be on the road once we get those drafts."