Russian entertainment company, Gazprom Media, has announced that a movie adaptation of Metro 2033 will begin filming next year. The premier of the long-awaited adaptation is currently set for January 1st 2022, Variety has revealed.
The book’s original author Dmitry Glukhovsky, will be in a creative producer role for the project, giving the writer some input into how the film is created. “Metro 2033 is my first novel. It played a very special role in my life, and, despite getting numerous offers to [adapt it for the screen], I turned them all down for over 10 years,” he said speaking candidly, “But now I finally met a team that I can entrust ‘Metro’ with. Our ambitions turned out to be similar: to create a world-class blockbuster and stun even those who have read the trilogy and know it by heart. So as not to disappoint them, I am ready to become a creative producer of the movie and help create it with both my advice and action.”
So while this is a good sign for the film project, at least in theory, a lot of other pieces still have to come together. Director and cast have yet to be announced. So that means the script is likely still needing to be written and finalized before casting and full production can begin. Book-to-film adaptations are always a messy business, and sometimes they go amazingly well, like Jurassic Park. Other times they turn into creatively confused messes like the famously antagonistic production of Fifty Shades of Grey, which involved serious clashes between the director and original author Erika Leonard.
Hopefully, the Metro 2033 production can avoid such pitfalls and see some wide commercial success. And given the massive cultural influence the works have had on Russia and the rest of the globe, there’s some serious potential here. Evgeniy Nikishov, another of the film’s producers, said something similar, “In the last decades, a real mass culture cult of post-apocalyptic fiction has taken shape in our country, therefore, it bears great box-office potential.”
