How Tom Holland’s love of Uncharted helped shape the film

digitaltrends.com:

The film adaptation of Uncharted has been a long time coming. Sony originally started developing the project in 2008, shortly after the first game in the series launched. The film was passed between directors, producers, and casts for over a decade. As gamers would say, it was stuck in “development hell.”

In retrospect, it might have been a blessing in disguise. The game series quickly matured after its first entry, surpassing some of the blockbusters that inspired it. Deep characters, a riveting story, and jaw-dropping set pieces turned it into the poster child for “cinematic” video games. That gave Sony much more to work with when it finally locked down what would become the final cast and crew in 2020.

Uncharted, which finally hits theaters on February 18, now has the tricky task of getting players excited about a movie adaptation of a game series that in many ways has already topped Hollywood films. For director Ruben Fleischer, who I spoke to ahead of the film’s release, that meant knowing when to stick to the source material and when to part from it. Luckily, he had a superfan on set to help: Star Tom Holland.

When the Venom director originally came onto the project in 2020, he had only played the first game in the series, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. As soon as he got the gig, he played through the rest of the series, with Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End becoming his favorite. He notes that the car chase in that title is his favorite car chase in any medium ever and one he’s itching to adapt in a film.

Flesicher was “geeked out” by the idea of a treasure-hunting game that essentially let players become Indiana Jones. The movie even makes some not-so-subtle nods to those movies throughout (“Nuns. Why did it have to be