A TV series adaptation of the “Wolfenstein” video games is in development at Amazon MGM Studios, Variety has learned exclusively.
Exact plot details are being kept under wraps, but the (incredible) official logline of the series simply states, “The story of killing Nazis is evergreen.”
Patrick Somerville is attached to serve as the creator, writer, executive producer, and showrunner on the project under his chaoticgood.tv production banner. Jonah Nolan, Lisa Joy, and Athena Wickham will executive produce via Kilter Films. James Altman of Keyframe Films and Jerk Gustafsson of “Wolfenstein” developer MachineGames will also executive produce.
The “Wolfenstein” franchise helped popularize first-person shooter video games. The games have largely centered on U.S. World War II solider William “B.J.” Blazkowicz. In the games, Blazkowicz goes behind enemy lines to fight the Nazis, only to discover they are engaging in bizarre experiments and the occult in an attempt to tip the scales of the war in their favor.
The first game in the franchise, “Castle Wolfenstein,” was released in 1981. It and the 1984 sequel, “Beyond Castle Wolfenstein,” were top-down perspective games. Starting with “Wolfenstein 3D” in 1992, the games shifted to first-person shooters. There have been 14 games in the “Wolfenstein” series in total, with the most recent being the VR game “Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot.” The games are currently developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks.
It was previously announced that a film version of the games was in the works back in 2012, but it never moved forward.
Should this project move forward, it would be the latest video game TV series at Amazon for Kilter Films. The company currently produces the hit Prime Video series “Fallout,” which is currently prepping to release its second season in December and has already been renewed for a third. In addition, Kilter has partnered with Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society to produce the TV adaptation of Rebecca Yarros’ adult fantasy novel “Fourth Wing” for Amazon. The company is also known for producing “The Peripheral” starring Chloe Grace Moretz for Amazon as well as for the hit series “Westworld” at HBO and “Person of Interest” at CBS.
Kilter Films is repped by CAA.
Somerville has been a fan of the “Wolfenstein” games since he was a child. He is best known in the TV space for creating the shows “Maniac” at Netflix and “Station Eleven” at HBO Max, serving as executive producer on both and showrunner on “Station Eleven.” He was also a writer and supervising producer on the critically-acclaimed HBO series “The Leftovers.” His other writing credits include “The Bridge” and “24: Live Another Day.” Somerville is also a novelist, having published the books “The Cradle” and “The Bright River” along with the short story collections “The Universe in Miniature in Miniature” and “Trouble.”
He is repped by WME and Artists First.
Amazon has multiple other projects in development based on games. Those include a “Mass Effect” TV series, a “God of War” series (which originally got greenlit in 2022), and a series based on the tabletop wargame “Warhammer 40,000” starring Henry Cavill.
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