Peter Berg Says His Call of Duty Movie With Taylor Sheridan Is All About the “Consequence of War” and “Cost of Having to Be A Warrior” (Exclusive)
Call of Duty has been one of the biggest games in the world for so long now that it’s almost shocking that it’s never gotten a major movie adaptation… until now. Director Peter Berg (The Kingdom, Lone Survivor) has made military action films his signature, which is why he’s a perfect pick to direct Skydance-Paramount and Activision Blizzard Studios’ upcoming Call of Duty movie adaptation. And Berg will be getting the perfect partner for the project: a script written by Taylor Sheridan, the creator of Yellowstone as well as the hit military-espionage-thriller series Lioness.
It’s been established that Berg and Sheridan are looking at the Modern Warfare era of Call of Duty as inspiration for the film; those games were set in modern-day (after the series started in the WWII era) and followed some of the most iconic characters in the series (Task Force 141). But the question many gaming fans are asking is what story angle have Berg and Sheridan come up with, in order to distinguish Call of Duty from any other war film?
Peter Berg’s latest film is The Mosquito Bowl, a Netflix film about four college football stars who join the Marines following the Attack on Pearl Harbor. They end up drafted into WWII, only to end up in the Pacific region, where they are recruited (along with other star athelete soldiers) to play a (real-life) football bame between Marine regiments on Christmas Eve, 1944, which would go on to be known as “The Mosquito Bowl.” It’s Berg’s first war film since Lone Survivor in 2013, but Call of Duty wll be coming right after it.
Peter Berg Explains The “Soul” of His Call of Duty Movie
During the press junket for The Mosquito Bowl, ComicBook’s Law Sharma asked Peter Berg how his experiences as a war movie director were helping him shape Call of Duty.
“So modern warfare, if you really look at the missions, and the storylines, and the characters – like Captain Price, and Soap, and Ghost, and Alex – these are complicated humans,” Berg explained. “These are not – and no disrespect – cartoon characters or comic books. These are very nuanced storylines; like, there’s a real soul to the Modern Warfare universe… And, yes, there’s violence, and there’s hardware, and equipment, and there’s killing – but underneath it I think the game, and the craters of the game, are really looking at the cost of war, the cost of having to be a warrior who’s, for whatever reason, chosen to put himself between real danger and the rest of us, and the burden that these guys carry.”
Anyone who has played a Modern Warfare game all the way through know just what Berg is referring to. Modern Warfare 2 infamously ends with a character having to crawl through being stabbed to grab a gun and finish off the big bad. It was a wild gaming experience that reinforced the themes of sacrifice that soldiers make for the mission.
“And that’s real stuff,” Berg continued. “This is not just ‘Hey, let’s shoot them all up and shoot popcorn!’ Like, there’s a soul underneath it, that I understand that Taylor Sheridan understands, and I think probably not quite as graphically violent as Mosquito Bowl, but there will be a very strong soul, and consequence of war within the film, called “duty.”
Call of Duty is in prodcution. The Mosquito Bowl premieres on Netfli on November 25th.