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Deus Ex is a truly beloved video game franchise. The 2001 original has come to define the loose “immersive sim” genre and is regularly listed among the greatest games of all time. The series saw a big revival in 2011 with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, though 2016’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided failed to meet sales expectations, and future titles were put on ice.
Now we’ve gotten a tantalizing peek at a Deus Ex movie that was in development in 2012, with Bradley Cooper eyed to star as Adam Jensen. Doctor Strange‘s Scott Derrickson and writer C. Robert Cargill were working on a script that loosely adapts the story of Human Revolution, in which a security specialist receives cyborg augmentations and unravels a conspiracy in a dystopian cyberpunk world.
USA Today’s FTW section has extensive excerpts of the script. These mostly mirror the game, showing Jensen’s pre-augmentation life and his relationship with his girlfriend Megan. Their peace doesn’t last. As in the game, Jensen’s workplace is attacked, and he’s severely injured.
Here the script departs from what players are familiar with. One of the most iconic lines is that Jensen “didn’t ask for this”, in reference to his shiny new robot arms. Here he outright asks for the upgrades, turning him into a killing machine hellbent on revenge.
Sadly, this never came to pass. Universal Pictures sounded skeptical from early on, and Derrickson eventually switched focus to Doctor Strange. As production executive Scott Kinney tells it:
“I don’t think I really understood the studio’s reasoning at the time. They communicated that Deus Ex wasn’t the kind of film they wanted to make or felt comfortable making, that their overall strategy was shifting from action films like Dwayne Johnson’s Faster, which they had previously financed, to films more like The Duff. Of course, Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill left the project for Doctor Strange and it just died.”
It’s a shame because this could have been among the best game movie adaptations, combining elements of RoboCop and Blade Runner into a gold and shiny whole. Right now, Deus Ex is completely dormant. I imagine it’ll be revived at some point, though clearly not anytime soon.