Image: Holland as he appears in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Nathan Drake as a child in Uncharted 4. Credit: Sony Pictures/Sony Computer Entertainment

Sony’s long-in-gestation adaptation of the smash hit video game series Uncharted has apparently gone under a major reworking. It’s now a prequel series set before the events of the games, and its hero Nathan Drake will be a youngster played by Spider-Man himself.




Deadline reports that Shawn Levy’s film—itself a retooling of initial plans for an adaptation of Naughty Dog’s Indiana Jones-esque action series—will now take inspiration from flashback sequences shown in the third game of the series, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, which showed the young Nathan Drake meeting his future partner-in-crime Victor “Sully” Sullivan for the first time.

Young Nate as he appeared in the PS3 video game Uncharted 3.


The website claims the vast retooling of plans for the film came when Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman saw a new cut of Spider-Man: Homecoming, which has lead to not only Uncharted getting a new re-write—with Sony allegedly currently hunting for a new writer to re-do Joe Carnahan’s cript—but also Homecoming star Tom Holland coming on board to play the young Drake.

It’s definitely not an angle many Uncharted fans would’ve expected the movie series to take. And perhaps it’s a little disconcerting that the whole sea change and Holland’s involvement allegedly comes from a reaction to his performance as Peter Parker, rather than out of a sense that it’s right for Uncharted. But still, we’ll have to wait and see if this iteration of Uncharted is the one that ultimately moves forward, or if it faces the same tumultuous fate past attempts at bringing Drake to the big screen have.