For years, fans of the Uncharted video game series have been clamoring for a live-action movie, TV show, or really anything filmed and distributed with Nathan Fillion playing the lead role of Nathan Drake. The actor himself has said on multiple occasions that he’d be thrilled to join an Uncharted movie, but when Sony finally did announce one, Tom Holland (Spider-Man: Homecoming) was said to be attached to play a young Drake.
So rather than wait around for another opportunity to star in a big-budget action movie based on the franchise, Fillion instead opted to produce and star in a short, live-action fan film which dropped on YouTube this morning. It might not have a big budget, but it does an incredible job capturing the spirit of the game.
Directed by Allan Ungar (Gridlocked), the film stars Stephen Lang as Sully and Mircea Monroe as Elena alongside Fillion’s Nathan Drake. The short follows Drake after he has been kidnapped by a group of shady-looking individuals who believe that he stole a priceless artifact, which he denies. What follows is a series of action scenes that feel like they could have been ripped from one of the games, with all the actors fitting perfectly into their roles:
The best part of the entire short might be the moment after Drake jumps out of a window, at which point the camera pans behind him and the screen widens out, as if we were moving from an in-game cutscene to actual gameplay. It looks exactly like it does in the Uncharted games — the perfect amount of fan service.
There’s no telling whether or not this will lead to anything more substantial, but if the actual Uncharted movie never climbs its way out of development hell, at least we finally got the live-action Nathan Drake we deserve.
