The Division Movie Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Jessica Chastain Heading To Netflix
After years spent trapped in development hell, The Division is finally moving forward — but not into theaters.
At the 2019 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) on Monday, French video game company Ubisoft announced during its keynote presentation that the Division film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Chastain is heading to Netflix.
The live-action adaptation of Ubisoft's action RPG Tom Clancy's The Division, the forthcoming flick has Deadpool 2 director David Leitch sitting at the helm. Gyllenhaal is on board to lead The Division, with Chastain evidently portraying his right-hand woman. Details on their characters still haven't been revealed.
It wasn't long after Ubisoft let the world know that Netflix scooped up The Division that the streaming site released an updated synopsis for the film. It reads, "In the near future, a pandemic virus is spread via paper money on Black Friday, decimating the city of New York and killing millions. By Christmas, what's left of society has descended into chaos. A group of civilians, trained to operate in catastrophic times, are activated in an attempt to save who and what remains."
News of a feature film translation of The Division first surfaced in June 2016, when Variety published a report confirming that Ubisoft had put such a project into development and that Gyllenhaal inked a deal to star in the film and produce alongside Ubisoft Motion Pictures CEO Gerard Guillemot. Two months later, Chastain boarded the pic, and then things went quiet until early 2017. January of that year saw Academy Award-winning Traffic director Stephen Gaghan sign on to helm The Division, but he ultimately dropped out and left the seat open for Leitch to fill in April of 2018. Since Leitch's on-boarding, there has been virtually no movement on The Division – until now, of course.
Though we're sure some fans would prefer to see The Division on a massive theater screen while they munch on popcorn and candy rather than from the comfort of their own home, Ubisoft partnering with Netflix for the project seems like the best course of action. Video game movies have a notoriously bad track record in terms of box office performance and critical response (it's called the "video game movie curse" for a reason, friends), so perhaps Ubisoft slowly came to the realization that moviegoers might be hesitant to see The Division because it falls in the same contentious category as movies like Warcraft, Assassin's Creed, Bloodrayne, Postal, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, and that god-awful Super Mario Bros. film from the '90s.
With The Division, both Ubisoft and Gyllenhaal have a chance to prove themselves. The studio can (hopefully) show that not all game-to-movie adaptations are bad, and the actor can (fingers crossed) make up for his pretty terrible turn in the 2010 video game film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
The Division is currently without a release date.