‘Death Stranding’ Movie Director Officially Confirms Status of Long-Awaited A24 Film [Exclusive]

A24 has spent the last couple of years positioning itself as one of the great video game adaptation producers of the future. That’s expected to start with Death Stranding. First announced in 2022 before the indie giant’s involvement was confirmed in 2023, the film will bring Hideo Kojima‘s 2019 vision of a post-apocalyptic America to life, but progress has been a bit slow-going. A Quiet Place: Day One filmmaker Michael Sarnoski came aboard back in April 2025, and since then, there’s been a steady flow of positive, if minor, updates about how things are going in active development. However, according to the writer-director, the script is now closer than ever to completion.

In an interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub for his new film, The Death of Robin Hood, Sarnoski was asked about the status of the script for Death Stranding. He not only confirmed that he’s “working on a revision right now,” but also that the team now has a script ready to go, with the main goal now being to sharpen his writing. Kojima himself had already given Sarnoski’s work a thumbs up, as had the rest of the team involved, the director said. “We’re really excited about it. Everyone’s really psyched and happy with it. You know, just going through my process of deepening it and finding all those themes and really interconnecting everything as much as possible. I love it.

The story of the game Death Stranding centers on Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus), a courier traveling a bleak version of the United States where a cataclysm has unleashed spectral creatures across the wasteland. With colonies increasingly isolated, he sets out with the help of his allies at the Bridges organization to bring supplies to those who need them and set up a communications network between the remaining population, all while evading a violent militia group hellbent on wiping out the remainder of humanity. Sarnoski won’t be directly translating Sam and his Bridge Baby’s journey, though. Not entirely unlike Zach Cregger with his Resident Evil movie, he’s focusing on new characters within this world and is looking to recreate the feelings and themes he experienced when playing Kojima’s “strand-like” game. That said, an appearance from some of the game’s most iconic faces, like Deadman (Guillermo del Toro) or Fragile (Léa Seydoux), isn’t ruled out.

“It’s an original story within that world where you might see some characters from the game pop up. But really, the core is about these kinds of new characters and their journey. The goal is to really sort of capture the feeling of when I played the game and the themes that really spoke to me, the themes of connection, both across space and time, through generations, and isolation, and expression and creativity. They’re all these things that I found really moving in the game.”

‘Death Stranding’ Is Cut From a Similar Cloth to ‘The Death of Robin Hood’

The way Sarnoski is approaching Death Stranding appears somewhat similar to The Death of Robin Hood. Starring Hugh Jackman, his take on the timeless tales of the heroic outlaw is a grim re-examination of Robin’s legendary status, forcing him to reckon with his willingness to kill and commit other crimes after he’s gravely injured in battle. In the end, Death Stranding is made with a similar connection that fans will recognize, but in a way that creates its own unique journey that still feels fresh and stands on its own compared to Sam’s story.

“This is sort of my version of doing something within this world that very much feels like Death Stranding, but is kind of also totally its own thing. So, I think the goal is that it’s something that, if you’ve played the games, there’s tons of stuff in there that you’ll connect to and it will feel familiar, but if you haven’t, it very much stands on its own two feet as just this beautiful journey.”

Sarnoski’s latest, which is also under A24, features a star-studded group around Jackman’s grizzled outlaw, including Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgård, Murray Bartlett, and Noah Jupe. So far, reviews have been solid, if a bit divided, since the film premiered at the 73rd Sydney Film Festival last Friday, June 12. It seems bound to be a bit divisive, peeling back the romantic veneer of the classic character to reveal something darker and grittier, focused on a man past his prime rather than a daring thief gallivanting with his merry men.

‘The Death of Robin Hood’s Color Palette Serves Its Gritty Tone

If anything, The Death of Robin Hood is a showcase of how intentional a filmmaker Sarnoski is, down to the specific colors he chooses. “I can talk about the color palette. Yeah. All day,” he said when asked about the look of his latest. The gritty, earthy feeling seen in promotional footage and images was at the heart of it all to accurately represent the environment and the people, including Robin, who are shaped by it. “We were very specific about it. At the beginning, we wanted it to be grays and browns. That’s the environment. That’s the costumes that people are wearing. Everyone kind of feels like they’re kind of grown from the Earth.”

One color he was especially wary about employing was the color green, given how tied it is to the title character. “Very few people wore green in this movie because that’s such an iconic Robin Hood color.” Since Sarnoski’s movie shows a very different side to the almost mythical figure Robin is made out to be, he thought it better to reflect the color instead in the person closest to him, who was most affected by his adventures. “Actually, the only people that wear green are Little John and his family,” he continued. “The idea being that Little John kind of has this fanciful idea of the adventures that they lived, and he’s kind of bought into that a little bit.” The thematic focus on color extends to the color blue, which Sarnoski saved primarily for the priory and for Robin’s slow awakening and salvation under the care of Sister Brigid (Comer).

“But then we reserved the color blue for the priory. We never see any blue in the wardrobe — obviously the sky and all that stuff — until we get to the priory. The prioress is kind of this matriarchal figurehead who’s adorned in blue, but then everyone at the priory has a little bit of blue in their wardrobe. Even Robin, as he stays there longer and as his old wardrobe gets mended, it’s mended with blue thread. One, we wanted to kind of introduce a little bit of that color and life as we move into spring and as we move into this kind of awakening for Robin Hood, but also, we chose that color blue because it has a lot of historical meaning. It’s associated with Celtic paint. There’s woad that they would wear as sort of a war paint — maybe historically there are some questions about that, but that’s like in Braveheart, why he’s half blue.”

Beyond the sort of symbolic and historical importance, there’s also a biblical element to how blue is employed in The Death of Robin Hood. Sarnoski explained how much attention to detail there is in explaining how the priory finds the blue dye, in turn saying something about the faith, knowledge, and dedication of the prioress.

“And then also, blue is sort of this holy color from the Old Testament, and there’s a specific holy dye that was created, that was sort of lost, like the recipe of it was lost, but they theorized that maybe it came from sea snails, and I like this idea that the prioress, who’s so deeply educated in these things, has found the ancient recipe, and because they’re this coastal environment, they’ve sort of found a way to recreate that holy biblical blue. Obviously, none of this is said in the movie, but if you look in the background, you can see there are snail shells in these big buckets, and they’re making this blue cloth and things like that.”

In the filmmaker’s eyes, these small details are made to help The Death of Robin Hood feel more lived in, but in the case of the priory, specifically, it’s about creating this experience of a true brush with the divine that helps shape Robin’s atonement. “All of this is to sort of be felt, but at the end of the day, it just kind of opens up the film, and you feel like you’re coming to life, and you’re connecting to something sort of divine and beyond yourself as you get to the priory,” Sarnoski concluded. That level of artistic intentionality is a good sign for Death Stranding, given how much attention there is to the environments in Kojima’s game. There’s a blend of the natural, the supernatural, and the mechanical within its dreary post-apocalyptic world that makes for a hauntingly beautiful style unlike anything else in gaming.

The Death of Robin Hood premieres in theaters on June 19. Stay tuned here at Collider for more on Death Stranding as development continues on the game adaptation.

Writers

Hideo Kojima

Producers

Hideo Kojima, Allan Ungar

Franchise(s)

Death Stranding