Dwayne Johnson was interested in the movie version of the Saint's Row videogames - and that it all went wrong...
The Saint’s Row series of videogames wear their movie love on their proverbial sleeves, so a film version was inevitable. Nick Nunziata became a producer on the project, and in a new post over at Fandom, he’s explained why the Saint’s Row movie never made it to the screen.
He revealed that a screenplay had been panned by Peter Aperlo, and that Lloyd Levin and Andrew Cosby were on board to produce (between them they’d helped bring the likes of Watchmenand 2 Guns to the movies). “We had interest from huge directors. A-list stars were on the menu. The script was a perfect video game adaptation, faithful to the source material but with a swagger and big screen energy all its own,” Nunziata wrote. “To me, it felt like a modern-day Escape From New York, only bigger and with that Saint's Row attitude”.
So where did it go wrong? Concept art had been created, the story was coming along. And then? “THQ went into bankruptcy.” After that, the movie pretty much died a death.
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A shame. As screenwriter Peter Aperlo revealed, “our plot ended up hitting a lot of the same notes as Saint’s Row II, with the Boss as a Count of Monte Cristo figure coming in to reclaim what was once his. Throw into the mix Dane Vogel wanting to convert a chunk of Stilwater into a private prison (something that’s still relevant today) and a lot of over-the-top action and darkly humorous social commentary (a la the original RoboCop), and that was essentially our Saint’s Row."
Dwayne Johnson, for one, was said to be very interested in appearing in the film, although that in turn meant that Aperlo was asked to prepare a version of his script that was PG-13, only allowed one f-bomb, and took out lots of the nudity and violence. 10 Cloverfield Lane’s Dan Trachtenberg was one of the names on the director’s shortlist too.
When Koch Media picked up the Saint’s Row franchise, it didn’t have the interest in making a film (and, indeed, it dropped out of film distribution in the UK a year or two back). For the time being at least, the Saint’s Rowmovie is dead.
