Director Hideo Kojima says his upcoming film "Death Stranding" (opens in new tab) will be very different from other major film adaptations of video games In a wide-ranging interview with IGN, the acclaimed game developer discusses the difficult relationship between movies and video games, and how it influenced his thinking about his plans for a film adaptation of "Death Stranding."

"The failure of video game adaptations from a while back has led to a lot of films aimed at gamers. I have taken the approach of changing and evolving the world of 'Death Stranding' to fit the film. I made Death Stranding as a game, and games are games. A game is a game, and it doesn't need to be a movie. So in a way, the Death Stranding movie is going in a direction that no one has ever gone before: making a movie about a game.

The "Death Stranding" movie is a collaboration between Kojima Productions and Alex Lebovic, executive producer of the recent horror film "Barbarian. Kojima's decision to work with Lebovic was based on the shared "vision" the two creators had for the film. From the very beginning, my intention was not to make a blockbuster," Kojima said.

"And the only person who offered to make such a film was Alex Lebovich."

In parallel with the major project of the film Death Stranding, Kojima also revealed that he was working on a short film that was "put on hold" as a result of the pandemic. It was a script I wrote with the intention of putting it out as a video," he said. I was thinking of making this as a short film as my first step into Hollywood, and I still have the script, but I don't intend to make it again, at least not now."

As well as his various film projects, Kojima also discussed his ongoing work on video games. He talks about his complete rewrite of "Death Stranding 2" after the pandemic (opens in new tab), as well as his cloud project with Microsoft, which was discussed this past June.

"The project we're working on with Microsoft is something we've been thinking about for five or six years already. That project required infrastructure that had never been needed before, so I had discussions and presentations with various large companies, and they thought I was really crazy." According to Kojima, it was Microsoft that "showed me the way" and they are now collaborating on the project, "including the technical aspects."