Yep, you read that right: Grammy-award winning music artist and actor Donald Glover is directing and starring in a live-action series adapting Krafton’s battle royale game, PUBG.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is getting the Hollywood treatment with a TV show that will be written, produced, directed by, and starring Donald Glover. His brother, Stephen Glover, is also involved in the project as a co-writer and executive producer.
Other executive producers on the series include Michael Schaefer for Neon TV, Fam Udeorji for Gilga, and Taeseok Jang and Sujin Lee for LV3H. As told in a press release shared with IGN, Krafton — the South Korean gaming conglomerate that owns the franchise — is intent on expanding the IP into “original entertainment content.” LV3H, its entertainment entity, is also helping develop and produce the series.
While making an entire series based on a game where 100 players are dropped onto an island to fight to the death might seem like a bit of a stretch, there’s actually some pretty deep lore that explains the ‘why’ of it all. Admittedly, PUBG was initially created as a purely multiplayer experience, but it has since been fleshed out with an encompassing narrative that can be read on its official website.
The long and short of it is that the Battlegrounds are the brainchild of a billionaire named Sergei Kalimnik, who was the lone survivor of a deadly Soviet attack on the fictional island of Erangel in 1965. After experiencing “17 days of conflict” and watching Soviet officials attempt to dispose of their victims’ corpses, he came up with the brilliant idea of eventually buying the island and recreating his childhood trauma on a grand scale — conscripting 100 people and forcing them to fight until only one remains.
It’s sort of like Squid Game, when you think about it; these experiments expanded to other locales, while audience of shadowy, untouchable elites, much like the VIPs from Netflix’s hit South Korean thriller series, watch from afar. According to the PUBG Universe page, this also somehow ties back to a centuries-old tradition called ‘Magna Venari: The Great Hunt’ that began in the early 15th Century. Described as the “hunting of human prey,” it sought to answer a single question: “Why do some survive when others do not?”
There’s, surprisingly, a lot for Glover to work with here. And given his talents in showbiz (Atlanta, Community, Swarm), I’m genuinely keen to see what he brings to the table from the PUBG world.
This is the latest video game to score a celebrity-led adaptation following news of Michael B. Jordan’s Battlefield movie. He, alongside Christopher McQuarrie, are reportedly shopping the adaptation around to different studios in hopes of bringing Electronic Arts’ popular military game series to the silver screen. Sony has emerged as a frontrunner to snag the film, though any other news remains nebulous for now.
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Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.