Shouldering one franchise can take its toll on the headline star. Tom Holland is about to take on two.
The young actor, who impressed with his 2012 debut The Impossible, has seen his Hollywood stock rise quickly thanks in large part to appearing as Peter Parker (aka Spider-Man) in last year’s ultra-successful Captain America: Civil War. This summer, Holland will web-sling his way into theaters with his very own Spider-Man adventure (Spider-Man: Homecoming). Sony Pictures, the studio releasing the comic-book pic, is so high on Holland that they want to build a secondary franchise around the actor.
That secondary franchise is Uncharted, based on the Naughty Dog video game franchise that’s exclusive to Sony PlayStation systems. Holland’s casting is inspired from the franchise’s third installment (Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception) where we get a sequence in Cartagena, Colombia of a 14-year-old Nathan Drake looking to steal a ring that once belonged to Sir Francis Drake. The sequence also finds Nathan meeting Victor “Sully” Sullivan, a man also looking to steal the ring for his employer and someone who would become a mentor to young Drake.
Rather than look to adapt one of the video games to screen, Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman sees reformulating Nathan Drake’s story as the best way to approach the character without infringing on critical and commercial acclaim of the gaming franchise. Uncharted is a title that Sony has been trying to bring to film for a number of years. Prior to Shawn Levy coming on board to direct, others who were on again/off again included filmmakers David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) and Joe Carnahan (Narc, The A-Team), plus screenwriters David Guggenheim and Eric Warren Singer.
In several respects, casting a young actor to play Nathan Drake to build a franchise is similar to how Square Enix rebooted famous adventurer Lara Croft, an archaeologist-adventurer heroine in the mold of Indiana Jones, with the 2013 video game Tomb Raider. Angelina Jolie played Croft in a pair of films in the early 2000s. Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl) will star in the film reboot of the character, set to open in theaters March 2018.
