The Uncharted movie has been as cursed as — and is almost as old as — one of the ancient objects that Nathan Drake chases across the globe on his treasure-hunting video-game adventures. There are articles in the ScreenCrush archives about the film going back eight years, and even those first articles refer to the fact that it’s already been in development a while. (“Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune May Yet Hit the Screen” is the very first headline I can find.)

It still may yet hit the screen ... but it hasn’t happened yet. The project has gone through one director after another, and just about as many actors attached to play its hero, Nathan Drake. Way back in 2010, David O. Russell was interested in making the movie with Mark Wahlberg as his star. By 2014, Seth Gordon was in the mix and he wanted Chris Pratt to play Drake. In 2016, Shawn Levy came aboard and shortly after that Tom Holland joined the project — signaling that the film would be a prequel set before the storyline established in the popular PlayStation games. (At some point, Wahlberg switched to playing Drake’s friend and mentor, Sully.)

Holland stuck around, but Levy didn’t — and neither did Dan Trachtenberg, who replaced him. (Travis Knight came and went after that.) Finally, earlier this year Venom’s Ruben Fleischer signed on to direct Uncharted — and today, after alllllllll of that, Tom Holland tweeted a picture from the set, indicating that production had finally, after many years, actually gotten underway on Uncharted.

The Uncharted movie is not out of the woods yet. There’s still the little matter of making it in the midst of a giant global pandemic. Uncharted is scheduled to open on July 16, 2021. Based on everything that’s happened to this point, though, you’ll forgive me for being a little pessimistic about actually seeing it on that date.

Gallery — Great Movies That Became Horrible Franchises:

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