A24’s Death Stranding Adaptation Lands A Quiet Place: Day One Director Michael Sarnoski

If A Minecraft Movie's eye-watering $301 million opening weekend at the box office has taught us one thing, it's that Chicken Jockey truly is a powerful thing. But if it's taught us something else, too, then it's that the current videogame adaptation boom — spurred on by the likes of The Last Of Us, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Sonic The Hedgehog — is going nowhere soon. Just last week, we learned that Wes Ball's The Legend Of Zelda will (Hy)rule cinemas in 2027, and now today Deadline have confirmed that A24's upcoming adaptation of Hideo Kojima's post-apocalyptic open-world epic Death Stranding has found its director.

Per Deadline's reporting, none other than Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One helmsman Michael Sarnoski has been tapped to bring Kojima's beautiful, bonkers world of BTs, babies in jars, time accelerating rain, and long-distance courier deliveries to the big screen. According to the trade's sources, Sarnoski's film is set to dig deeper into the mysteries surrounding the game's titular series of catastrophic events, a strange brew of happenings that smudged the lines between the living and dead in nightmarish, near-apocalyptic ways. Whether the feature, which Kojima has previously stated "will be for anyone who loves cinema", will revolve around Norman Reedus’ courier Sam Porter Bridges from the game or not remains to be seen — as does whether or not Sarnoski will bring aboard any of Kojima's all-star cast from the video game, which included the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Edgar Wright, Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, and Margaret Qualley.

Still, even with an air of mystery thickly blanketed over A24's Death Stranding, the hiring of Sarnoski — a filmmaker who shares Kojima's thematic preoccupations with isolation, connection, and all of that which is lost and found in the great chasm between — bodes well for a cinematic experience that's worthy of the game first and foremost, but also one that has its own story to tell, too. We'll bring you more on A24's Kojima collaboration just as soon as we get it, but in the meantime, we're heading back to the timefall swept sands of a crumbling America in preparation for Death Stranding 2: On The Beach's 26 June arrival. Here's hoping it delivers, eh? Eh? Eh?! Fine...