Nearly two years ago came the announcement that “John Wick” helmer Chad Stahelski was attached to direct “Ghost of Tsushima,” a film adaptation of the PlayStation 4’s fastest-selling first-party video game.
Heavily inspired by filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s works, the highly acclaimed title is set on Tsushima Island off the Japanese coast in the 13th century. The story begins as the fearsome Mongol Empire invades the island, wreaking havoc. As one of the last surviving samurai, Jin Sakai rises from the ashes to fight back.
As of 2023, the project remains in the works at PlayStation Productions and Stahelski’s 87Eleven Entertainment production company. At last report, the film will be a Japanese language film with an all-Japanese cast but a Hollywood-style budget, and they hired award-winning writer and director Takashi Doscher (“Only,” “Still”) to pen the script.
With Stahelski having essentially wrapped work on “John Wick: Chapter Four,” he’s now about to go out and promote the film ahead of its March 24th release. Naturally the question of what he’ll do next has come up and he has spoken with Total Film (via Slashfilm) where he indicates ‘Tsushima’ is what he wants to do next. However, there are logistical issues to work out that will determine if that’s the case:
“[‘Ghost of Tsushima’] would be my favorite to do next. Without going into crazy detail, it’s something I’m superinterested in. We have a really great script. We have a really good creative team behind it. It’s just about getting all the business end of things locked in.
It’s kind of in that little bit of flux where everybody is trying to tighten up the deal to get everything going and to make sure we do the best with it. It’s a simple thing: getting a great script and starting to put together a cast. It just takes a lot of moving parts.
Obviously, ‘Ghost’ is a special project. Everybody realises it. Everybody wants to do it, with the introduction of new technologies and a new way to do the epic samurai vibe… There are just a lot of things to put together before we really pull the trigger on making it, mostly from my side creatively. And we’re in that process right now, trying to pull everything together, so we knock it out of the park.”
Stahleski’s name remains attached to a number of projects in development, including a “Highlander” reboot starring Henry Cavill, an adaptation of Trevanian’s corporate espionage tale “Shibumi,” an adaptation of Richard Kadrey’s supernatural vigilante vs. magicians novel “Sandman Slim,” an adaptation of Ed Brubaker’s comic “Kill or Be Killed,” and an adaptation of Marc Olden’s “Black Samurai” books.
