In 2012 it was announced that Tom Hardy would play Sam Fisher in a feature film adaptation of the hit video game Splinter Cell and that Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow) would direct the film.
Over the years, there have been a few updates on the project, but it ultimately never went anywhere and today, the film’s producer, Basil Iwanyk, confirmed that the film project is dead.
Iwanyk told TheDirect the Splinter Cell movie was put to rest after the creative team “couldn’t get it right”. But, he did have some praise for the unproduced film, saying:
“That movie would have been awesome… Just couldn’t get it right, script-wise, budget-wise. But it was going to be great. We had a million different versions of it, but it was going to be hardcore and awesome. That’s one of the ones that got away, which is really sad.”
When previously talking about the film, the producer said it would’ve felt like more of a “badass, Tom Hardy action movie” than a video game movie. He went on to talk about the challenge of making the movie.
“The challenge of making Splinter Cell interesting was we didn’t have this IP with a very specific backstory. That allowed us to make up our own world and really augment and fill out the characters.
“I don’t think one applies to the other because I don’t think our movie will feel like a movie that came out of a video game, I think it’ll feel like a badass, Tom Hardy action movie, which is what we wanted.”
He added: “We’re definitely going to make it a hard PG-13. No, it’s not going to be like [John] Wick,’ but it’s going to be badass. The good and the bad news is that, obviously, the Bond movies have had a resurgence and the Jason Bourne movies are the Jason Bourne movies, so we’re trying to stay away from those movies in terms of tone, in terms of bad guys, in terms of settings.
“What’s a world that we haven’t seen yet? What’s an area of the world and a conflict that we haven’t really touched upon in movies in a long time, to make it feel fresh?”
It would’ve been interesting to see how this Splinter Cell movie would’ve turned out. I’m sure that one day a Splinter Cell movie will get made, but it will come from a whole new creative team.
The game series follows Sam Fisher, a highly skilled operative of a fictional covert-ops division within the NSA known as “Third Echelon.” Equipped with cutting-edge gadgets, tactical expertise, and his iconic trifocal night-vision goggles, Fisher embarks on high-stakes missions involving espionage, counterterrorism, and political intrigue.
