'Then why make a Call of Duty movie?': gamers respond to a director who doesn't want shootouts
Peter Berg says his Call of Duty film is about the cost of war, not the body count. Paramount has already tested a game adaptation that kept its distance from the game, and it lasted two seasons.
Peter Berg spent part of his Mosquito Bowl press tour describing the Call of Duty movie he's making next, and one line did the rounds: "This is not just 'Hey, let's shoot them all up and shoot popcorn!'" His pitch, delivered to ComicBook.com on October 22, is a film about "the cost of war, the cost of having to be a warrior" and "the burden that these guys carry."
Berg wasn't dismissing the source. He called the Modern Warfare games a universe with "a real soul," named Captain Price, Soap and Ghost as "complicated humans," and promised violence and hardware — just not as the point.
The comments under the story were not reassured. The top reply asks the obvious question: "Then why make a Call of Duty movie?" The second-most-common worry is more specific: "I just hope they actually use Call of Duty characters and it isnt just a war movie with the title slapped on."
Paramount has run this experiment
That second comment describes something Paramount has already shipped once. The Halo series premiered on Paramount+ in March 2022 as the service's biggest launch to date, took Master Chief's helmet off in the first episode, and gave the character a romance the games never implied. The distance from the source was a stated feature, not an accident.
"We didn't look at the game. We didn't talk about the game."
— Steven Kane, Halo showrunner, to Variety in 2022
Paramount+ canceled Halo in July 2024, after two seasons. The producers shopped it to other platforms, and no one picked it up.
The war movie angle is circular
There's a wrinkle in promising that a Call of Duty film will transcend its game and become a serious war picture: the game is a serious war picture's grandchild. The original 2003 Call of Duty was built by Infinity Ward, a studio founded by the developers of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault — and Medal of Honor itself was created by Steven Spielberg in the wake of Saving Private Ryan. A prestige-war-drama Call of Duty wouldn't be elevating the franchise so much as returning it to the shelf it was taken from.
Don't miss: HBO's War is Industry with lawyers — and actual lawyers are rolling their eyes
Where the project actually stands: Paramount and Activision announced the deal in September 2025, Berg and Taylor Sheridan signed on to write that October with Berg directing, and the film draws on the Modern Warfare era and Task Force 141. There's no release date and no cast — Berg's Mosquito Bowl hits Netflix on November 25, and Call of Duty is his next stop after it.
Previously we wrote: Clayface ending explained: is Matt Hagen dead or alive — and what the final scene means for the DCU