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Helldivers 2 is being made into a movie, and if we’re lucky it’ll feature a star-studded cast from top to bottom—and if we’re really lucky, we’ll get to watch them all die horribly at the hands of marauding bugs, bots, and creepy aliens.
That ambitious plan was shared on the Helldivers 2 Discord by Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani. “We’re all hoping for as many A-list actors as possible,” Jorjani wrote in response to a user who expressed hope that Chris Pratt—he who seems to star in everything—won’t be in the film. “As long as they all get killed violently immediately.”
Signing up a bunch of big names just to kill them off as graphically as possible is perhaps not the most realistic plan ever, but it’s not without precedent. My mind immediately flashes back to the 1996 action flick Executive Decision, starring Kurt Russell and Steven Seagal, in which Seagal gets unceremoniously snuffed in the first act. (Seeing that in the theater at a time before the internet spoiled everything was a real kick, let me tell you.)
It’d be a lot of fun to watch known names show up in the Helldivers 2 movie, do their thing for a few minutes, and then get whacked in some awful way—I’d absolutely love to see Michael Ironside brought in to reprise his “Rico, you know what to do!” scene from Starship Troopers. But Arrowhead may not have much of a say in the matter. Arrowhead chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt said on X that while the studio will be involved in the film, it’s not clear to what extent just yet.
“The long answer is that we’ll see,” Pilestedt wrote. “We are not Hollywood people, and we don’t know what it takes to make a movie. And therefore we don’t, and shouldn’t, have final say.”
A-listers or not, the biggest challenge facing the Helldivers 2 movie out of the gate will be differentiating itself from Starship Troopers, the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film based on Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi novel of the same time, which tells a very similar (but slightly less on-the-nose and funny) tale of a fascist Earth engaged in endless war against alien bugs. Comparisons are inevitable, and while Starship Troopers did not go over especially well at launch—the satirical aspect was easier to miss in those more innocent days—it’s subsequently enjoyed something of a renaissance, as critics and audiences have come to recognize it as the subversive anti-fascist film it was meant to be. As PC Gamer’s Shaun Prescott wrote, it’ll be very interesting to see if the Helldivers 2 film “can manage to be more than a retread.”
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Kurt Indovina
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