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I had several immediate thoughts when the Call of Duty movie was announced in 2025, most of them some variation of, why? Regardless of your preferred Call of Duty sub-series, movie theaters and streaming services are already awash in an array of movies telling tales virtually indistinguishable from the big-time military shooters. Slap a CoD brand on The Terminal List, and you've basically got yourself a Modern Warfare movie right out of the box.
Which brings us to today's news, delivered by Entertainment Weekly, that a Sea of Thieves movie is also in development. It's apparently still very early-stages as a director hasn't been signed, but the film will be produced by Destin Daniel Cretton, the director of films including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day, through his Hisako Films production company.
"The main character of a Sea of Thieves game is actually the player and the community," Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty said. "So if you sit down to think about Sea of Thieves, it's not, 'who are the main characters? What's the plot?' It's a super social game, but there's a tone to Sea of Thieves. It's built on a very cooperative community, so you can start to sense what that's going to be like."
I can't say that really gives me a sense of anything at all, whether it's what kind of movie it will be or why it's being made in the first place. But the justifications for it do at least seem a little more solid than the Call of Duty movie, if only because there aren't as many examples of 'we have a Sea of Thieves movie at home.' Pirates of the Caribbean is the obvious choice—so obvious that an official crossover happened years ago—but otherwise? I'm admittedly not as hip to the pirate movie scene as I am to the war movie situation, but nothing else really leaps to mind.
Which doesn't necessarily make it a good idea, strictly speaking, but I think the open-ended nature of Sea of Thieves, which doesn't tie it down to a particular cast of known characters, gives it a better chance of finding an audience than a movie that has very rigid, fixed expectations right from the hop—and woe betide all involved if some aspect of it is wrong.
Far as that goes, you could even do a Pixar-style animated Sea of Thieves movie and pull it off—or, even better, ring it up in the classic Disney style for a real banger. Honestly, the more I turn this over in my head, the more I think that'd be a better approach than CGI'ing the hell out of a big-budget live-action production.
Yeah, you know what? I can see that working pretty well.
