Ruben Fleischer has already directed one film — Uncharted — based on a Naughty Dog video game. And it appears as though he is also adapting yet another Naughty Dog game into another medium as the director revealed that he is working on a Jak & Daxter adaptation.
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When speaking to Digital Trends, Fleischer plainly stated that he was working on something related to the series. He didn’t specify if it was a film or television series or if it would animated or live action.
“I’m actually working on Jak & Daxter, a version of that, for PlayStation, which I think would be really cool to bring to life,” he said.
This comes just after the Spider-Man and Uncharted star Tom Holland told GameSpot that he would like to make a Jak & Daxter live-action movie and play Jak if he were given a blank check. He jokingly suggested that he would want A24 to make it so it would be “really weird and, like, dark.” It’s unclear if this is a coincidence or if his comments are connected to Fleischer’s project.
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Jak & Daxter has been dormant for a long time. Naughty Dog’s Jak 3 ended the trilogy in 2004, but then released a racing spin-off called Jak X: Combat Racing in 2005. Ready at Dawn then developed the PSP spin-off, Daxter, which followed the ottsel in the time before Jak wakes up in the beginning of Jak II.
Naughty Dog also tried two other times to make a Jak & Daxter game. The Lost Frontier started at Naughty Dog, but, after multiple troubles with the PlayStation 3 hardware, the project was handed off to High Impact Games. The team finished the game to little fanfare. The second attempt came after Naughty Dog shipped Uncharted 2 and split into two teams. While one team made Uncharted 3, the other explored the idea of a Jak game, but scrapped it in favor of The Last of Us after realizing that they weren’t doing it out of passion. There is no Jak game in development at Naughty Dog according to President of Naughty Dog Evan Wells, but he said that the team still has “a lot of love” for the franchise.
Sony has been pushing more of its properties into other mediums. With the imminent release of the Uncharted film, upcoming The Last of Us HBO show, Twisted Metal series, and possibly something from Jak & Daxter, it seems as though Sony’s biggest video game properties aren’t going to just stay video game properties.
