Arrowhead will be involved with Helldivers movie, but won’t ‘have final say’

Nor does it want to have such power
Arrowhead / Sony

It’s difficult to say why anyone would want to make a Helldivers movie when Starship Troopers exists, but Sony recently announced one anyway. With video game adaptations having a rather dubious reputation, which was recently reinforced by the unsuccessful Borderlands film, fans of the third-person shooter had mixed reactions to the news. Naturally, they’d like to see developer Arrowhead take the helm of the project to ensure that it stays as faithful to the source material as possible.

Johan Pilestedt, the CCO of Arrowhead and creative director of Helldivers 2, didn’t have the most reassuring answer to that particular question when asked by a user on social media. “I’ve been dodging this question,” he wrote. “The short answer is yes.”

“The long answer is that we’ll see,” he added. “We are not Hollywood people, and we don’t know what it takes to make a movie. And therefore we don’t, and shouldn’t, have final say.”

It looks like Arrowhead will be involved in an advisory role on the project to answer any questions the people working on the movie might have, but it certainly seems like the developers don’t have any veto powers – nor do they want any, given that movies and games are very different types of media. In short: They don’t want to meddle with something they have little experience with.

Helldivers fans, though, overwhelmingly supported Arrowhead having that final say anyway with trust in Hollywood’s methods and talents obviously being at a low.

At the end of the day, though, this is more of a Sony project than an Arrowhead project, so there is reason to doubt that the developers would be able to attain more influence over the film even if they wanted it. Sony has previously ignored Arrowhead’s advice during the PSN account crisis in Helldivers 2, which lay much more in the developers’ area of expertise than movie production, after all.


Published
Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg