Metal Gear Solid movie in production at Columbia Pictures with Marvel Studios founder at the helm

Avi Arad, the that made X-Men, Spider-man and Iron Man the billion dollar franchises they are today, is working on a Metal Gear Solid movie.

Metal Gear Solid’s narrative legacy is dubious at best. Hideo Kojima’s games are well known for their cinematic pretensions—Ridiculous camera angles, theatrical fights, and expansive monologues on the nature of war and humanity that would make Aaron Sorkin blush. The 1998 PlayStation game was responsible for a generation of long cutscenes and military melodrama. People have fool heartedly pointed to the series as proof that games are storytelling equals to movies for nearly 15 years. Now Metal Gear Solid will complete its journey towards non-interactivity and become a movie.

During the Metal Gear 25^th Anniversary event in Japan that saw Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes announced for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Kojima Productions and Konami announced a new partnership with Columbia Pictures to bring the series to movie theaters. Marvel Studios producer Avi Arad, the man responsible for finding funding for some of the best comic book movies (Iron Man), as well as some of the absolute worst (The Punisher), is producing Metal Gear Solid. That brings Arad’s total video game adaptations in planning to 4 as he’s also working on Mass Effect, Uncharted, and inFAMOUS movies as well.

Arad sees promises that he’s bring video games to theaters with the same level of success, or at least frequency, that he did with comic book adaptations. “For many years I fought to bring comics to theaters,” said Arad at the event, “Comic books are not the biggest genre in cinema. Video games are the comic books of today. We will take our time and tell the story with all the nuances, ideology, and cautionary tales needed.”

So expect the movie to also feature men going to the bathroom in their pants and diaper-wearing monkeys.

It’s anyone’s guess if this movie will actually get made. Kojima first announced a Metal Gear Solid movie all the way back in 2006, working with movie producer Michael De Luca. De Luca was director of production at New Line Cinema during one of its most fruitful periods in the ‘90s, working on films like Seven, Dark City, Boogie Nights, American History X, and, um, Little Nicky. Konami got skittish about a subpar movie ruining the series’ reputation, so it stopped De Luca’s production in 2010.

Good thing it’s got the producer of Bratz: The Movie and Blade Trinity on board for Metal Gear now.