Joe Carnahan Says The UNCHARTED Movie Won’t Be A Straight-Up Adaptation

In a new interview with Collider, screenwriter/director Joe Carnahan has dropped a few hints about what we should expect from he and Shawn Levy's upcoming Uncharted adaptation, and - based on what he's saying - it sounds like they're on the right track.

Speaking to Collider's Steve Weintraub, Carnahan starts off by saying that he and Levy see eye-to-eye on Uncharted being something of an "anti-Indiana Jones" project:

Here’s the thing, Shawn is an incredibly bright, incredibly skilled, talented guy, and you sit with him for five minutes and you know and understand why he has the level of success he’s had. I think he understands, we both have tremendous fondness for Raiders, and he wants to, I think Shawn’s capable of doing a lot of things. I can tell you this: what I’ve written is very anti-Indy in the sense of the guy that loves museums and wants to preserve these artifacts. He’s not! He’s a thief and he’s a grifter, and he’s a scourge. He and Sully are not good guys but they’re better than the bad guys. It’s a game, you know, they’re certainly rogues, and certainly don’t have a problem, even in the first game he just kind of dump Elena and it’s interesting. I think it’s gonna be, I honestly think this one’s got a real shot. 

He goes on to explain that it will also not be a straight adaptation of any of the Uncharted games, but something that uses the games as a leaping-off point to become its own thing:

It just doesn’t function as a straight lift of the video game. I sat down with Amy (Hening, director of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune) and sat down with (Drake voice actor) Nolan North and sat down with Neil (Druckmann, writer of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune), who created this thing, and took them through what I was doing and what I was thinking of and they loved it. She loved it. She understands too that you can’t be so slavish and devoted to the source material.

I'd like to point out that everything Carnahan's saying strikes me as encouraging. This sounds like he (and, if we're taking him at face value, Shawn Levy) understands that Nathan Drake's a scoundrel, that he and his partner Sully operate within, eh, let's call it a morally grey area, and that none of the Uncharted games would immediately lend themselves to a strong film adaptation. I'm with you on all of this, Joe Carnahan.

Carnahan has a lot more to say in Collider's report, and you should definitely mosey on over there to read the rest. Or just head on down to the comments and debate whether or not this thing's actually going to get off the ground this time.