I don’t remember hearing a lot about the ‘Dante’s Inferno’ game but I do remember it being a ton of fun to play. Apparently someone over at Universal Pictures agrees with me as they going to be turning it into a film and brought Fede Alvarez (‘Evil Dead‘) on board to direct it.

The game was based upon the classic portion of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri and was developed by the creators of ‘Dead Space‘ which was a creepy science fiction thriller turned trilogy that is also headed to the big screen. With the creators of this game knowing how to write a dark narrative, it’s fitting that Fede Alvarez has been picked to help this project.

Fede’s work on ‘Evil Dead’ was both dark and disturbing. These two elements are key to fit with the styling of the game and the fact that the main character will be spending much of the time trying to rescue the love of his life from the depths of Hell itself. Not only that, but his search causes him to be used as a soldier between the ancient battle between Heaven and Hell.

Here is the synopsis of the game:

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate – Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

The Italian mercenary Dante returns home from the bloodletting that was the Third Crusade to two pieces of soul-crushing news. The first is that although he was assured that he was absolved of mortal sins committed in the form of wartime atrocities in the name of the churches interests in the Holy Land, that is not actually the case and his immortal soul is in grave peril. The second and more terrible is that his beloved Beatrice has been murdered, and her soul pulled down into hell by a dark force. Vowing not to accept the damnation of either souls, he gives chase, vows to get Beatrice back and descends into the infamous nine circles of hell. For weapons, he wields Death’s soul-reaping scythe, and commands holy powers of the cross, given to him by Beatrice.

While the game was released in 2010 and Universal picked up the rights almost directly after, no word has come down the pipeline in quite some time about the film. Bruce McKenna (‘The Pacific,’ ‘Band of Brothers’) is listed as having put together an early draft with Jay Basu (‘The Dinosaur Project,’ ‘Monsters: Dark Continent’) being the most recent writer on the project.

What do you think about ‘Dante’s Inferno’ getting the big screen treatment? Are you excited for what could be or are you worried about the curse of video game movies that so often fall short of the source material?

Source: Deadline