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At the risk of catching a [citation needed] tag, we\u2019re going to go ahead and say Steven Spielberg likes war movies. And also, it\u2019s been revealed in the past, war\u00a0video games. His son, game designer Max Spielberg, gave an interview last year<\/a>, for example, in which he noted that his dad\u2014who briefly indulged in video game production himself many years back, creating the genuinely fun Jenga\u00a0riff\u00a0Boom Blox\u00a0for the Nintendo Wii\u2014is actually a fairly avid gamer. That apparently especially applies to the\u00a0Call Of Duty\u00a0franchise, gaming\u2019s biggest series of military shooters, which Spielberg indulges in regularly. (Only the story campaigns, though, so that x_BruceTheSharksDad_x you headshot in\u00a0Black Ops 6 last week probably\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0the Oscar-winner.) All of which leads up to the very weird revelation this week that Spielberg apparently volunteered to direct a version of the film adaptation of the military shooter franchise that was just announced at Paramount\u2026<\/a> and got turned down.<\/p>\n This comes from\u00a0Puck News<\/a>, which recently reported that Spielberg pitched himself to game publisher Activision as a natural fit for a\u00a0CoD\u00a0movie. (On account of being Steven Spielberg.) That being said, and also\u00a0on account of being Steven Spielberg, he had some conditions for his participation, which apparently \u201cspooked\u201d the massive games publisher. That is, he wanted final cut of the movie, and full control over the production.<\/p>\n Not being a massive games publisher ourselves, we genuinely don\u2019t know how we\u2019d respond to those admittedly daunting caveats. On the one hand, sure, you\u2019re taking your company\u2019s single biggest brand and taking it into theaters, potentially generating either billions of dollars or a total fizzle that spoils the waters for years; we get being nervous about handing off control of that ball to anybody\u00a0else. On the other hand: Holy shit, would people go see\u00a0Steven Spielberg\u2019s Call Of Duty. Even Spielberg\u2019s more mercenary or zeitgeist-guided flicks\u2014looking at you, Ready Player One<\/a>\u2014still made $600 million at the box office, while also seeing him push himself in pursuit of his various artistic obsessions. There are no sure things in making movies, but this one feels like such an obvious slam dunk that passing it up can\u2019t help but seem kind of wild.<\/p>\n As it stands,\u00a0the Call Of Duty movie doesn\u2019t have a director attached. (Stefano Sollima, who previously helmed\u00a0Sicario: Day Of The Soldado, was named in connection with the project several years back, but that push was apparently abandoned.) As for Spielberg, he\u2019s keeping typically busy: Although details (and a title) are still being kept quiet, he reportedly recently finished filming a new movie with Emily Blunt, currently scheduled for a Summer 2026 release with Universal.<\/p>\n