A major video game adaptation appears to have found its home. Sony Pictures is in talks to acquire the film rights to Battlefield, the long-running Electronic Arts shooter franchise, after fielding interest from multiple studios. Christopher McQuarrie is attached to write, direct, and produce, while Michael B. Jordan is on board to produce, with his starring role still contingent on a few unresolved factors. Sony has declined to comment.
The deal would put one of gaming’s most enduring franchises in the hands of two filmmakers with very different but equally proven track records. Battlefield first launched in 2002 with the World War Two-set Battlefield 1942 and has since built a reputation on massive, chaotic multiplayer warfare spanning historical conflicts and near-future battlegrounds. Its most recent installment, Battlefield 6, released last year and outsold every other shooter on the market, Call of Duty included, making it both the best-selling entry in the franchise’s history and the top-selling shooter of the year. That rivalry carries over to film: Paramount already has its own Call of Duty movie in the works, with Peter Berg directing a Taylor Sheridan script set for a June 2028 release, setting up a potential box office showdown between the two franchises around the same window.
For Jordan, Battlefield adds to an already packed slate following his first Oscar win for Sinners. He’s built real familiarity with video game adaptations before this, having starred as John Clark in Amazon’s Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse and developed a follow-up built around Rainbow Six. Ahead of Battlefield, audiences will see him star in, direct, and produce a new version of The Thomas Crown Affair, landing in theaters March 5, 2027, and opposite Austin Butler in Universal’s Miami Vice ’85, where he plays detective Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs.
Rounding out the producing team are Electronic Arts’ Jesse Stern, Emerald Neon’s Carter Swan, Vertigo’s Roy Lee and Miri Yoon, and Outlier Society president Elizabeth Raposo. No plot details have been revealed. McQuarrie steps into the project fresh off closing out Tom Cruise’s run as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and has King Conan with Arnold Schwarzenegger and an upcoming Doug Liman-directed space film with Cruise still ahead of him.
With talks still ongoing and Jordan’s involvement as star not yet locked, the bigger question is how quickly Sony can close this deal before Paramount’s Call of Duty film gets a head start toward theaters.