First, they announced a Helldivers movie. Then they revealed that The Minecraft Movie‘s Jason Momoa would star in it. Then it turned out that Momoa would not be enlisting to defend Super Democracy. Now we are told that Reacher‘s Alan Ritchson is set to lead humanity to victory against the Terminids and Automatons.
This latest update in the meandering struggle to get this PlayStation game adaptation made comes from The Hollywood Reporter. It states that Momoa bowed out over “creative differences” with director Justin Lin, who he previously collaborated with on Fast X. It also points out that this would be Ritchson’s first-ever time headlining a “theatrical studio feature.”
Nothing else is known about the Helldivers movie other than it’s supposed to release on November 10, 2027, which is only a little over a year away. They should probably get to filming if that’s the case. Gary Dauberman apparently wrote the first version of the script. He was also just tapped to write Five Nights at Freddy’s 3.
Ritchson seems like as good a pick as any, having transformed Amazon’s adaptation of the Jack Reacher books about an ex-military vagrant who solves crimes and fights injustice into a streaming hit, mostly by virtue of Ritchson being an ominously big dude who occasionally fights other very big dudes.
While losing someone with Momoa’s star power might seem like a bad sign for the Helldivers movie, anything that puts it even more squarely in direct-to-DVD B-movie territory is a plus in my book.