‘Just Cause’ Movie Adaptation Being Written By ‘John Wick’ Writer Derek Kolstad

Just Cause movie

If you threw some comic books, a couple third-person shooter video games, and some B-list action films from the 1980s into a special Movie Blender™, you’d probably end up with the John Wick movies. Then again, depending on the specific content of those ingredients, you might instead end up with the destruction-heavy adventure story Just Cause.

So it’s no surprise, then, that John Wick trilogy writer Derek Kolstad has been hired to write the script for a Just Cause movie based on those games. Read more about that franchise (and watch some truly insane gameplay videos) below.

The Hollywood Reporter says Kolstad has officially been hired to write Just Cause, which was previously in development with Brad Peyton (San Andreas) on board as a director and Jason Momoa (Aquaman) attached to star. There’s no word about whether the latter two are still involved or if this is a completely new vision for a new group of filmmakers.

The plot of the games are very much secondary to their open world action sensibilities, which allow the protagonist, a special ops guy named Rico Rodriguez, to perform daring stunts and blow shit up in spectacular ways. Unlike something like Grand Theft Auto, another open world franchise in which players derive pleasures from blowing things sky high, the Just Cause games are explicitly about destruction: you’re actually tasked with destroying enemy bases and blowing up things like communication towers, but the games let you make the decision of how exactly you want to implement that carnage.

That freedom works wonders in the games as you dive out of airplanes, use a wingsuit to cruise through enemy territory, drop bombs, and randomly hook enemies together using a grappling hook. But it goes back to the age-old video game movie adaptation question: will turning an actively creative experience into a passive one be successful? Based on what he did with the Wick films, Kolstad may be able to capture the anarchic glee of these games, but it remains to be seen if that can sustain an entire feature-length script.

Producer Adrian Askarieh, who’s been trying to adapt this into a movie for ten years, is still on board, and now the movie will be produced by Constantin Film, the company behind films like the Resident Evil saga, every live-action Fantastic Four movie, and The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. And last we heard, Kolstad was also developing a TV version of the video game Hitman for Hulu.

Here are a few gameplay videos highlighting the truly ridiculous amounts of destruction you can unleash in the games:

And this one shows how you can attach items together with a grappling hook device when Rico Rodriguez hooks an enemy jeep to an attacking helicopter and blows them both up: