Tom Holland Pushed Sony for an ‘Uncharted’ Origin Movie

Last week, Sony raised eyebrows when it announced that it was finally moving forward with its long-struggling Uncharted adaptation, albeit in a direction that no one saw coming. Despite the Uncharted series taking place with an older and more world-weary male protagonist, Sony cast Mr. Spider-Man himself, Tom Holland, as a young version of Nathan Drake. The film would be based on a sequence in one of the sequel which flashes back to Drake’s relationship with his older brother; while Uncharted purists may find this to be an odd choice, it does potentially set Uncharted up for decades of movies with an aging Holland as the lead.

To hear Holland say it, though, a younger Nathan Drake was kinda his idea. In a recent conversation with Yahoo Movies (via Heroic Hollywood), Holland described a meeting with the head of Sony where he described his desire to play the lead in an Uncharted series. As transcribed by Hollywood Heroic:

It was a conversation I had with Tom Rothman about the potential of different movies that I’d like to work with with Sony and I just had the idea that maybe a young Nathan Drake would be something that audiences would be very interested in. I met [director] Shawn [Levy] at the MTV awards and we had a brief chat about the potential of doing an origin story rather than copying what the games have done and it seems like people have been really excited about it, I know I am.

In the interview, Holland also throws out a few names for Sully, the mentor-type figure to Nathan Drake throughout the series. While he originally described a preference for Jake Gyllenhaal in the role, he also describes spending some time with Chris Pratt on the set of Jurassic World 2  —  a bit of a name-dropper, our young Mr. Holland  —  and now thinks he’d be the perfect actor for the character. While fans may still be split on the decision to go young with Uncharted, there’s something to be said for an actor who’s as passionate about a project as Holland obviously is about this film. If the first one is a hit, we may be able to enjoy decades of Uncharted movies with Holland remaining the one constant throughout. I guess kicking off decades-long franchises is the new market inefficiency.