Donald Glover Will Direct and Star in a PUBG TV Series for Netflix And Everyone Is Saying the Same Thing
Donald Glover is making a PUBG TV series for Netflix, and fans have two pretty fair questions: What? And how? The Emmy-winning creator of Atlanta is set to direct and star in a live-action adaptation of the battle royale game with his brother Stephen Glover. This isn’t exactly the type of project you’d expect from the man behind “This Is America,” especially considering that PUBG had its biggest moment nearly a decade ago.
According to Deadline, Glover will also write and executive produce the series with Krafton, the company behind PUBG. The game helped kick off the battle royale craze in 2017, with a huge 3.25 million concurrent players on Steam by January 2018. Fortnite eventually stole much of the spotlight, but PUBG remains a massive international success. While fans may be surprised by the news, Krafton has been trying to get a TV series started for years.
It makes sense to bring Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds to the screen once you know where it came from. The game was inspired by Battle Royale, a brilliant, violent Japanese thriller from 2000 about a group of kids who are stuck on an island and have to kill each other. The movie, which was based on Koushun Takami’s book, became a cult classic and set the standard for movies like The Hunger Games and hit games like PUBG, Fortnite, and Apex Legends. Really, if you’ve never seen it, you should. It’s actually free on Tubi right now.
Bluehole (now Krafton) formed a writers room in 2019 to develop a PUBG series for Netflix. The project started as an anime before evolving into a premium television pitch. The team developed an extensive story bible that was almost an action version of The Truman Show, with most of the drama coming from machinations in the control room. That version was sidelined, but elements of the lore made it into the game. Chief among them is the introduction of the chess piece-loving Russian, Sergei Kalimnick.
The season 4 cinematic trailer, co-written by yours truly with Sean Orlikowski and the creative team, was one of the first attempts to give PUBG a proper backstory. Released with an updated Erangel map in 2019, it showed the bombing and destruction of the island from the perspective of a young boy who manages to survive the onslaught. That boy would grow up and turn his trauma into an insane competition, trying to give others the feeling of being a “Lone Survivor” like he was. It’s a pretty dark origin for a game that was better known for frying pans and chicken dinners.
Krafton continued building on that mythology. In 2021, Eternals’ Don Lee starred in the live-action short Ground Zero as a prisoner fighting for his life while guards watch on CCTV footage, establishing the first underground “prison tapes” that led to the Battlegrounds. That same year, Krafton announced an animated PUBG project with Castelvania producer Adi Shankar that never materialized.
Donald Glover May Be Exactly What PUBG Needs
Donald Glover isn’t the first name that comes to mind when imagining a PUBG adaptation, but Atlanta and Mr. & Mrs. Smith both show that Glover can bring a range of perspectives to a straightforward premise. Atlanta could be hilarious, disturbing, and surreal, often in the same episode. Meanwhile, his work on Mr. & Mrs. Smith took a familiar action movie premise and gave it a far more personal point of view. Throw in some inventive firefights and we’re sold. One need look no further than Community‘s famed paintball episodes to know Glover can handle himself in a shootout.
“This is America” might be the biggest reason to see what Glover has cooking for PUBG. Childish Gambino’s provocative music video about America’s obsession with gun violence and spectacle was a revolutionary piece of art. Now he’s been given the keys to a property where the rich watch people murder each other for sport. If you think Donald Glover isn’t going to steer into the skid to deliver something unexpected, you haven’t been paying attention to his career at all.
Given the Childish Gambino connection, it’s almost surprising that he wasn’t attached to something in the world of Apex Legends. Glover performed at the Titanfall launch party during SXSW in 2014, the in-game universe of Apex. More recently, he voiced Yoshi in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. We quietly hope they sneak into the game’s Dino Land for a Yoshi-sized Easter egg, but maybe that’s my bias for the Vikendi map. Netflix hasn’t announced a release date, but after seven years of trying to bring PUBG to television, Krafton might finally get its chicken dinner.