‘Duke Nukem’ Movie Proceeding at Legendary With ‘Cobra Kai’ Creators
“Hail to the king, baby.” A film adaptation of the Duke Nukem video game series is in development from the team that brought The Karate Kid franchise back to life with Cobra Kai.
The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Legendary Entertainment will be moving forward with a film adaptation of the Duke Nukem IP that will be overseen by franchise owner Gearbox and Cobra Kai showrunners Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg as producers, with Jean Julien Baronnet also producing. A search for a writer and director is underway, with it being possible that one of the Cobra Kai team may step up to direct the film. John Cena was attached to Gearbox’s previous attempt to get the IP off the ground for Paramount a few years ago, but that effort stalled out, and it remains to be seen if Cena will once again be cast in the title role. While that project stalled, another Gearbox adaptation, Borderlands, moved forward at Lionsgate, with the film expected to release this year.
Duke Nukem originally started as a pair of side-scrolling 2-D platformers for MS-DOS, being a fairly family-friendly run-and-gun adventures that gained popularity as a shareware title, with a standard action hero being the last line of defense against hordes of alien invaders. However, when the character made the jump to 3-D, the franchise really found its identity as a first-person shooter, with the game breaking ground on a technical level as its badass protagonist cranking out one-liners borrowed from popular 1980s films – in the character’s own words, “It’s time to kick ass and chew bubblegum – and I’m all out of gum.” The franchise became incredibly raunchy, violent, and sexually explicit, which made the game immensely controversial back in the day alongside shooters like Doom, but those aspects helped drive sales and build interest in the escapist character.
Naturally, the approach that made Duke Nukem so controversial in the 1990s may end up being controversial now – the character is practically the poster boy of traits commonly associated with what’s been dubbed as “toxic masculinity”, being an ultra-macho, bloodthirsty womanizer. And, aside from various notorious development troubles tied to 2011’s Duke Nukem Forever, that game was hurt by the same traits that made the video game hero popular back in the 1990s with bare-bones stories being dubbed as one-dimensional for a then-contemporary game, given that more in-depth narratives are expected of most AAA video games. So, for a film adaptation to succeed, it is likely that whatever creative team takes on the project will have to end up adjusting the character for the modern day and with more in-depth storytelling sensibilities, which could make or break the adaptation.
Grant Davis is a freelance writer who has covered entertainment news for more than seven years. His articles have frequently appeared in Star Wars News Net as well as as other entertainment-related websites. As someone who grew up on Star Wars and comic book movies, he’s completely thrilled with the current era of genre entertainment.
