Ubisoft’s E3 press conference wasn’t all about real video games and TV shows based on fake video games, as it also included a brief mention of a real movie based on a real video game with the announcement that director David Leitch’s adaptation of Tom Clancy’s The Division—starring Jessica Chastain and Jake Gyllenhaal—has been picked up by Netflix. The last time we had heard anything about this project was in April of last year, when Deadpool 2 director David Leitch signed on to direct, so it wouldn’t have been too surprising if this movie had faded away into development hell like so many other video game adaptations do.
And yet, it actually got mentioned at E3, where everyone’s dreams of long-dormant projects come true—as long as those dreams don’t involve Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. Ubisoft didn’t offer any release info, and a subsequent Deadline story doesn’t have any further details, so now we’ll have to wait and see what Netflix is planning. It doesn’t sound like a whole lot of actual production has happened yet, though, so it could be pretty far off.
For those who haven’t jumped into The Division or its recent sequel, the game takes place in a world where a deadly virus was spread with cash on Black Friday in New York, leading the city to become quarantined. The eponymous Division is a covert group of highly trained civilian operatives who are called into action to go into the city and kill the gang members and rogue military leaders who are trying to take advantage of the chaos. The aforementioned sequel, which moves the action to Washington D.C., establishes that the country has been effectively wiped out by the virus and there’s no hope of anyone actually saving the day. Video games are fun.