Fans of the Deus Ex franchise will now be able to view the movie script of what would have been a great video game movie.
Back in the early 2010s, CBS Films had plans for the movie director Scott Derrickson, and his co-writer C. Robert Cargil for a movie adaptation of Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution before being transferred to Marvel’s Doctor Strange. After Derrickson and Cargill’s transfer to Marvel, the Deus Ex movie was quietly cancelled when CBS lost interest in the movie.
Although the movie was cancelled, thanks to a recent interview between USA Today and a development executive that worked with Derrickson, Scott Kinney, a 2014 script draft for the Deus Ex movie resurfaced, giving us an insight into the lost movie’s promising scripts that can be read here.
“I don’t think I really understood the studio’s reasoning at the time,” Kinney explains, “They communicated that Deus Ex wasn’t the kind of film they wanted to make or felt comfortable making, that their overall strategy was shifting from action films like Dwayne Johnson’s Faster…I’m really, really sad CBS Films fumbled the ball on this project because I believe Scott would have knocked Deus Ex out of the park to finally make the first great video game film adaptation.”
For those who are unfamiliar with the video game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the third instalment of the Deus Ex franchise. The game is an action RPG that takes place in the year 2027 following the story of Adam Jensen. While on duty as a security specialist, he was impacted by a life-threatening injury and underwent body augmentation to be saved. He wouldn’t have survived without his limbs being replaced by military-grade tech and becoming a killing machine as a result.
There was a noticeable difference in the beginning. In the game, Jensen never wanted his body to be augmented, but in the movie he asked for his augmentation in order to get his revenge. Other than that, the script appears to be faithful to the game.
“We made really good progress on that script, and it’s an incredible property,” Derrickson told Empire Online in 2014. “The folks over at CBS Films hired myself and C. Robert Cargill, I love them, they’re great people. It was a really positive process that was going on, and it was a little heartbreaking.
Thanks to Kinney, fans of the Deus Ex franchise are able to have a taste of the movie that never made it to the big screens.
