Two years ago it was announced that MGM was in development on an adaptation of the novel and video game series Metro 2033, but now author Dmitry Glukhovsky has revealed that plans for the feature film have been scrapped.
Speaking to VG247 (via Dark Horizons), Glukhovsky revealed that the rights to the property have now reverted back to him, and that MGM’s efforts to “Americanize” the property simply wasn’t working out.
“A lot of things didn’t work out in Washington DC,” said Glukhovsky. “In Washington DC, Nazis don’t work, Communists don’t work at all, and the Dark Ones don’t work. Washington DC is a black city basically. That’s not at all the allusion I want to have, it’s a metaphor of general xenophobia but it’s not a comment on African Americans at all. So it didn’t work. They had to replace the Dark Ones with some kind of random beasts and as long as the beasts don’t look human, the entire story of xenophobia doesn’t work which was very important to me as a convinced internationalist. They turned it into a very generic thing.”
“With Metro Last Light and Metro 2033 – the books and the games – selling millions and millions of copies worldwide, it’s probably not as improbable now that people would accept a story happening in Moscow because that’s going to be the unique selling point,” he continued. “We’ve seen the American version of apocalypse a lot of times and the audience that like the genre are educated and saturated and not really wishing to get anymore of that.”
While the movie has been scrapped, fans of the series do have the new video game Metro Exodus to look forward to on February 22nd 2019.
