A Duke Nukem movie has been in the works for many years, but it looks like it finally could be moving forward with Legendary Entertainment picking up the movie rights. As reported by THR, Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who created the recent series of Cobra Kai, are signed up to produce the film. For fans of the ultra-violent game franchise, this will be exciting news after so many false starts in the past.
Duke Nukem is a $1 billion game franchise that originally launched back in 1991, as a platform game pulling much of its inspiration from 80s action movies, with a muscled hero attempting to battle his way through an alien invasion of Los Angeles, taking in strip clubs, spaceships and movie sets on the way, and fighting off mutated humans and alien monsters. The subsequent sequels continued to build the franchise, seeing 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D popularize the first-person shoot-em-up and 2011’s Duke Nukem Forever brought the gun-totting hero back after more than a decade in hiatus.
While there have been many attempts to get a movie of the franchise off the ground, most of these have been by independent filmmakers and have not made it very far into development. The most recent attempt came four years ago from Paramount, who had attached John Cena to play the title role. However, that version never made it beyond initial development, but it could be possible that this time around things might be different and Duke Nukem may blast his way into cinemas sometime in the next few years. As of now, there are no writers or director linked to the project.
Duke Nukem Could Be Another Game Adaptation Hit.
For decades, making movies out of video game franchises has been a hit and mostly miss scenario. For every Sonic The Hedgehog there has been half a dozen Super Mario Bros. Recently though, things seem to have come to a turning point, with video game adaptations being big business again and actually managed to put out some decent projects in the process. As well as two Sonic the Hedgehog movies, we have also had Detective Pikachu, Rampage and Tomb Raider all doing well at the box office. In addition to this, a number of streaming platforms have been developing TV series based on the likes of The Last of Us, Twisted Metal and Resident Evil.
While a project like Duke Nukem could be either really good or really bad, the premise of the game alone sends out a message that the project will not be winning any Oscars, but will please those looking for a big action blockbuster that doesn’t take itself too seriously and just wants to blow things up. While Cena could consider once again joining the new project, he is now quite busy with other projects, as is fellow former wrestler Dwayne Johnson, who could also fit the mighty, muscled hero role. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we find out more about the Duke Nukem project, but we will probably not see the movie hit cinemas for at least two years.