Extraction 2 director Sam Hargrave thinks there’s “potential” in a Call of Duty: Warzone movie.
Chris Hemsworth returns as Tyler Rake in Extraction 2, a sequel to Netflix’s most-watched original movie of all time. The film follows the Aussie mercenary after dragging himself back from the brink of death and taking on another suicide mission: rescuing a mother and her children from a blood-and-mortar Georgian prison.
It ups the ante in almost every way, coming equipped with a whopper of a oner and some of the most crunching, cheer-worthy kills you’ll see this year.
Comparisons to the FPS series aren’t new; one reviewer even described the first film as “John Wick running a Call of Duty campaign mission.” While the director isn’t overly familiar with the games, he sees “potential” in adapting Warzone into a movie.
Extraction 2 director on possible Call of Duty: Warzone movie
One Extraction 2 sequence feels like being dropped into downtown Verdansk as the gas is closing in: you’ve got soldiers sniping out of choppers, juggernauts mowing people down, firefights on rooftops, and campers getting blown to pieces at the top of elevators.
Dexerto spoke to Sam Hargrave ahead of the movie’s release and asked if he was at all inspired by Warzone when orchestrating the chaos in the city. The answer: not really, but possibly.
He explained: “The challenging part of this was… it’s such a grand scale. There’s so many different locations, and tying all those characters together in so many different locations and trying to keep a sense of space. You can get lost in that cityscape and, as an audience member, you go, ‘Where am I, and what’s happening?’
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“I’m actually loosely familiar with that IP, so it wasn’t a huge inspiration for me. Now, I can’t speak for the stunt team that helped design a lot of that stuff, or for Joe Russo when writing it – perhaps that was a huge inspiration, I don’t know.
“But for me, it was more about how do we do very interesting character-driven action set pieces within this larger action set piece that tells a grand story that all makes sense, and hopefully, audiences can keep some idea of where they are in that space.”
We then asked if he’d be open to turning Warzone into a movie, as the whole sequence is a tremendous proof-of-concept, in our opinion. “Anytime an IP exists that there’s a huge fan base for and has a cinematic quality – like a Warzone-type thing – I think there’s always potential there,” he said.
“You just have to find… what’s the heart? What’s the emotional hook that pulls people in and makes them want to engage for a 90-minute feature?”
Extraction 2 hits Netflix on June 16, 2023. Find out more about the movie here.