Call of Duty Shared Movie-Verse Announced

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As the 2010s dwindle down to their twilight years, the battles of culture and trend within the blockbuster landscape have all been pretty much decisively won.  Superheroes are here to stay, horror is a viable blockbuster source and also good again, ‘90s nostalgia wasn’t as big as we all thought it would be, Kaiju films are surprisingly popular, fantasy is now a succession of up-jumped Disney fairy tales, and shared universes are a bad idea that people just can’t get enough of.  

Now, as we enter the last three years of the decade, we prepare for the period where the culture of the 2020s will emerge, much the same way Facebook, Twitter, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have defined the 2010s even though they started 3 years before the decade did. 

One of the emerging trends is a renewed interest in mining the world of video games for lucrative franchises in a Hollywood that’s still very much defined by pre-existing brands.  Now I could comment on how Hollywood always makes the same mistake of adapting video games that draw from movies for inspiration, so they end up the third part of an idea human centipede.  

Or I could talk about how the AAA games industry is so committed to crashing that they’ve more or less given up on pioneering new, lasting intellectual property, but both of those are arguments for another day.  Instead, we’re going to focus on how this new trend is hoping to blend with an old one thanks to the recent announcement that a Call of Duty cinematic universe is in the works. 

Movie Monthly - The Crazies

And so we reach the final film in the Month of the Zombie.  So far we’ve seen weird dehydration comet zombies, voodoo zombies, and resurrected mortician corpses so I thought I’d close things off with a much more contemporary film featuring a more modern understanding of the zombie: the infected.  The idea of “infected” rather than zombies is part and parcel to the explosion of zombie popularity that hit during the culturally defining years of 2007-2010. Zombies had been brewing for a come back in the nerd culture sphere since the early days of the 21^st century with popular cult hits like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the Dawn of the Dead remake feeding the flames.  However, from 2007-2010 we had the birth of Left 4 Dead, the Call of Duty zombie mode, Zombieland, Dead Snow, and The Walking Dead, a 5-way punch that cemented zombies as the defining cultural monsters of the 2010s.  However, with this resurgence came change as the idea of zombies as shambling corpses gave way to a more fast paced and destructive flesh machine zombie and the term “the infected” developed to describe them.  Suddenly zombies became infinitely more dangerous and powerful than humans but in only one film did they actually get smarter, 2010’s The Crazies.