‘Twisted Metal’ Games Get TV Series Starring Anthony Mackie

Well, it’s proven almost impossible for Hollywood to make a great film based on a video game but how about a TV show? Television might make a better medium for video game adaptations that cinema; TV and games share a screen, and the length of most modern games — with stories that can stretch dozens of hours — is way more appropriate to a series than a single, standalone movie.

Several upcoming show will test that theory. HBO is adapting The Last of Us, while Paramount+ has a highly-anticipated series based on the Xbox franchise Halo. Now Sony’s getting into the act too with a series inspired by their long-running PlayStation franchise Twisted Metal, which debuted on the very first PlayStation in 1995 and has been a mainstay of the system in all its various iterations. The show already has its leading man: Anthony Mackie, fresh off his run starring in Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

The old PlayStation Twisted Metal games were relatively light on story; they gave players control of a variety of different heavily armed vehicles, which they used to drive around and destroy their opponents. According to Deadline, the TV series — developed by Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick — is about “a motor-mouthed outsider offered a chance at a better life, but only if he can successfully deliver a mysterious package across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. With the help of a trigger-happy car thief, he’ll face savage marauders driving vehicles of destruction and other dangers of the open road, including a deranged clown who drives an all too familiar ice cream truck.”

Mackie plays John Doe, a “smart-ass milkman who talks as fast as he drives.” But look: As long as the ice cream truck guy is in the show, that’s all that really matters. Per Deadline, Sony plans to shop the Twisted Metal to buyers “soon.”