World of Warcraft player, Warhammer 40K fan and The Witcher star who played through the CDPR games on the highest difficulty Henry Cavill is well on his way to becoming even more of a modern day folk hero for gamers – he wishes there would be a Red Dead Redemption movie, and he’d want to star in it.
Possibly even more popular among fans of video games than Cyberpunk’s Keanu Reeves, Cavill’s interest in video games has been well known for a while now, and the subject of a lot of fan attention. Possibly the first high-profile story linking him to the hobby was when he admitted to almost missing his audition for the role of Superman / Clark Kent due to a late night WoW session.
Seemingly unable to keep himself from nerding out (during an unrelated interview Cavill commented how a chandelier reminded him of a WH40K Blackstone Fortress), recently the star shared that he had begun playing Red Dead Redemption 2, and was so impressed with the game that he thinks it would deserve a movie adaptation; this is an idea fans of the franchise have been saying for years – the movie part, at least.
Of course, the actor was also not remiss to mention his desire to star in such a movie, should it happen. He definitely seems like he could pull off a cowboy role. This comment comes hot on the heels of Cavill’s outspoken interest in Amazon’s upcoming Mass Effect series. Is the actor gunning for a role in every major video game adaptation from now on? Not that we’d mind.
I’ve actually started playing Red Dead Redemption 2—I know I’m a little bit late to that party—but I started playing it and I’m really enjoying it. And so, something like that I think would be fun to turn into a movie.
Take-Two Interactive did release some brief, very corpo-speak sounding statement some months ago about looking into selling licenses to its IPs for the sake of TV and movie productions, and possibly looking into production itself, but it all seemed awfully vague and befitting a pipe dream. They are one of the biggest names in the gaming industry, so it would seem like a good fit, but the company is notorious for being cautious with innovation and trying anything new.
Rockstar Games, the developer behind the Red Dead franchise, hasn’t ever really made moves towards live action adaptations despite lording over some of the most universally recognized and beloved IPs – just look at GTA.
That said, despite their long and troubled history of infamy, video game adaptations have been slowly and steadily rising out of the gutter over the course of the past few years, and a Cavill-led Red Dead Redemption movie would definitely ignite plenty of hype and put butts in theatre seats. The Western genre is still beloved, but quite underrepresented in movies these days – the film would be pulling more than just gamers.
In any case, Cavill is still going to be busy with more seasons of playing Geralt in The Witcher, as the show is wrapping filming on its third season with more on the way.
