Announced two years ago, it seems that work on a film adaptation of the popular novel and video game series “Metro 2033” has been halted at MGM. As a result, the rights have reverted to author Dmitry Glukhovsky.
Glukhovsky told VG247 that the film’s scriptwriter F. Scott Frazier had intended to ‘Americanize’ the setting by moving it from Moscow to Washington DC, and it wasn’t working out. As the author says, the studio is of the mindset that “Americans have a reputation for liking stories about America,” and that doesn’t work with a story so very much intertwined with its Russian elements in story context, theme and tone:
“A lot of things didn’t work out in Washington DC. In Washington DC, Nazis don’t work, Communists don’t work at all, and the Dark Ones don’t work. Washington DC is a black city basically. That’s not at all the allusion I want to have, it’s a metaphor of general xenophobia but it’s not a comment on African Americans at all. So it didn’t work.
They had to replace the Dark Ones with some kind of random beasts and as long as the beasts don’t look human, the entire story of xenophobia doesn’t work which was very important to me as a convinced internationalist. They turned it into a very generic thing.
In fact, he says one of the game’s big selling points IS that it happens in Russia as filmgoers are kind of worn out on the idea of an American-set apocalypse after having seen it so many times:
“With Metro Last Light and Metro 2033 – the books and the games – selling millions and millions of copies worldwide, it’s probably not as improbable now that people would accept a story happening in Moscow because that’s going to be the unique selling point. We’ve seen the American version of apocalypse a lot of times and the audience that like the genre are educated and saturated and not really wishing to get anymore of that.”
The new game in the series, “Metro Exodus,” is slated to come out on February 22nd 2019.
