A24’s ‘Death Stranding’ “Not Very Violent,” Director Michael Sarnoski Confirms; Plans 2027 Shoot

Michael Sarnoski has “The Death of Robin Hood” in theaters this weekend. The director of “Pig” and “A Quiet Place: Day One” has received his first taste of mixed reviews, as “Robin Hood” sits at 58 on Metacritic.

Up next for Sarnoski is his A24 adaptation of Hideo Kojima’s “Death Stranding,” but he’s already warning fans that his take on the popular game will not be as gory or dark as some might expect — is A24 aiming for PG-13?

Speaking with GamesRadar, he said:

I wouldn’t say the script is very violent. There’s definitely a lot of, like, action and excitement to it. There’s some violence to it. I mean, Death Stranding is a brutal world…and it’s a world also where it feels like death is just around the corner.

So there needs to be that sort of visceral sense of, ‘oh, this could be it.’ It’s [a] sort of bleak and barren post-apocalyptic environment. So there is violence and action to it, but the role of violence is very different from this one. [The Death of Robin Hood] is a movie that kind of questions violence.

In Death Stranding, the sort of violence and action is about exploration and about understanding the world more deeply. So there will be some, but you’re not gonna see a lot of jaws getting ripped off in Death Stranding.

Much like what Zach Cregger is doing with “Resident Evil,” Sarnoski is making a standalone story, separate from the games but set in the same world.

Sarnoski, who is only 31, confirms he recently turned in a second draft of the script and hopes to shoot it in Iceland and Northern Ireland next year.

The game featured an all-star cast including Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, Margaret Qualley, and Elle Fanning, along with filmmakers like George Miller, Fatih Akin, Guillermo del Toro, and Nicolas Winding Refn. Will this cast return for the movie adaptation?

The game “delves into the mysteries surrounding the ‘Death Stranding’ — a catastrophic series of events that blurred the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead, bringing forth nightmarish creatures into a fragmented world on the brink of collapse.”