Respected director, Peter Berg, says Taylor Sheridan is bringing “soul” to the upcoming Call of Duty film.
For years, there’s been rumors of Call of Duty – the best selling video game franchise – jumping into the live action space. With all of the other well-established brands like Transformers and Minecraft doing so (and cashing in), it only makes sense that Call of Duty would try their hand at a motion picture.
And they went and got just the right guy to do it.
For those non-gamers out there, Call of Duty is a first-person shooter that’s considered to be one of the most successful franchises in the history of video games. It’s held the title of “Best Selling Video Game Series” for close to two decades, and hundreds of millions of people play the game across the globe. That’s what you call a “built-in audience,” if I’m not mistaken.
Taylor Sheridan and Peter Berg signed on to develop the movie in late 2025 after Paramount gained the rights to the Call of Duty franchise. So now, the accomplished duo (they’ve previously done Hell Or High Water and Wind River together) are co-writing what could be one of the most highly anticipated war movies of all time. Berg is set to direct the film – without Sheridan – though both will be producers on the film, along with David Glasser.
While speaking to ComicBook.com and promoting the film The Mosquito Bowl (another war movie), Berg fielded some questions about the Call of Duty film that he’s working on with Sheridan. The writer and director shared that there’s going to be some real depth to the story that ends up making it to the silver screen:
“Modern Warfare, if you really look at the missions, and the storylines, and the characters – like Captain Price, Soap, Ghost, and Alex – these are complicated humans. These are not cartoon characters or comic books. These are very nuanced storylines; there’s a real soul to the Modern Warfare universe.
Yes, there’s violence, and there’s hardware, and equipment, and there’s killing – but underneath it, I think the game, and the (creators) of the game, are really looking at the cost of war, the cost of having to be a warrior who’s, for whatever reason, chosen to put himself between real danger and the rest of us, and the burden that these guys carry.”
In other words, there’s not a writer or producer that’s better suited to handle this Call of Duty storytelling than Taylor Sheridan.
For years, through shows like Yellowstone and Mayor of Kingstown (among other shows), he’s found the perfect balance between violence and consequence. There’s often unbelievable action sequences followed by heart-felt conversations and grapples with guilt.
Though Sheridan never served in the military himself, he never fails to capture the tension of combat – and he’s earned the respect of real life veterans in doing so.
Berg and Sheridan have had success together before, and all signs are pointing towards them producing another memorable hit. That’s because the director says he and Sheridan have let Call of Duty be guided by soul:
“There’s a soul underneath it, that I understand, that Taylor Sheridan understands. There will be a very strong soul, and consequence of war within the film.”
We’ll get to see that “soul” and the rest of the work that Peter Berg and Taylor Sheridan have put into the film when the video game adaptation hits theaters on June 30, 2028.
