In what’s quickly become an arms race among streamers, Amazon MGM Studios announced it’s developing a TV series for Wolfenstein to add to its growing catalogue of video game adaptations.
The announcement came from Variety, which reports that Patrick Sommerville of Maniac fame will serve as its creator, writer, and showrunner. Alongside Sommerville, James Altman and Jerk Gustafsson of Keyframe Films and game developer MachineGames, respectively, will also serve as executive producers. While Variety goes on to state that plot details are being kept hush-hush, the publication did note that Wolfenstein‘s “incredible” official logline summarizes its premise succinctly, writing, “The story of killing Nazis is evergreen.” Luckily, we have a reasonably detailed history from its source material to glean more about the series beyond its prescient premise.
Wolfenstein is a first-person shooter legend dating back to the 1980s, primarily depicting the exploits of a soldier named William “B.J.” Blazkowicz as he infiltrates Nazi bases and riddles their grunts, mechanical automatons, and more with a righteous hail of bullets. The series began with 1981’s Castle Wolfenstein and originally largely dealt with Nazi experiments into the occult but was rebooted in 2014 by Machine Games, part of Fallout and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle publisher Bethesda Softworks, with The New Order. While Blazkowicz remains the series’ protagonist, the revived Wolfenstein follows an alternate history where Nazi Germany won World War II through the use of advanced scientific technology, going on to invade the world. Its most recent title, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, was released in 2019.
As mentioned earlier, should the Wolfenstein series materialize, it’ll see Prime Video and producer Kilter Films double-dipping into Bethesda’s catalog. The last of which is the Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell-led Fallout series. Fallout season two is slated to premiere in December, and it’s already been renewed for a third season. Outside of the Bethesda universe, Prime Video has three other gaming adaptations in development. These series include adaptations of BioWare’s sci-fi series Mass Effect, Santa Monica Studio’s God of War, and from the tabletop side of gaming, Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000, starring former Superman and Witcher actor Henry Cavill.
In the context of Prime Video’s slate of video game adaptations and in comparison to Netflix’s upcoming projects, including Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed, the trend of video game adaptations appears to be showing no signs of slowing. Our only hope is that Prime Video takes a page out of Netflix’s playbook with its casting, choosing Alan Ritchson of Reacher fame as BJ. If you have a large man on retainer, it’s only right to give him the role of one of gaming’s leading men.