Paramount's Call of Duty movie reportedly has its sights on an unsurprising A-lister to star: Mark Wahlberg. Over a decade after Activision started cooking up plans for a Call of Duty movie, a big-screen adaptation of the first-person-shooter franchise is finally moving full steam ahead at Paramount Pictures. The blockbuster video game adaptation is dated for June 30, 2028, with Hancock director Peter Berg directing and co-writing the screenplay with the undisputed cornerstone of Paramount's TV empire, Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan.
According to a post on Patreon from scooper Daniel Richtman, Paramount's upcoming Call of Duty movie is eyeing Mark Wahlberg for a role in the video game adaptation that is targeting an early 2027 production start. The Boston-born A-lister is best known for Ted, The Fighter, Daddy's Home, and Uncharted.
The news should come as no surprise, given that Wahlberg and Berg (or WahlBerg) are close friends and have a long-standing creative partnership on Hollywood action blockbusters. They first collaborated on 2013's Lone Survivor, before reteaming for 2016's Deepwater Horizon and Patriots Day, 2018's Mile 22, and, most recently, 2020's Spenser Confidential, a Netflix original flick.
Previously, Richtman stated that Call of Duty will take on a modern setting, signaling that Berg and Sheridan are taking inspiration from the Modern Warfare corner of Activision's catalog. The sub-franchise delivered its acclaimed original trilogy from 2007 to 2011, led by Infinity Ward, which revived the IP in 2019 with a rebooted Modern Warfare saga that will release its fourth game on October 23.
Hollywood is currently going big on blockbuster video game adaptations, as it finds greater financial and critical success with playable franchises than ever before. Before Call of Duty comes to theaters on June 30, 2028, gamers can look forward to Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Resident Evil, The Legend of Zelda, and more.
Mark Wahlberg's Call of Duty Movie Character Is Clear, But Concerning
Call of Duty's Modern Warfare games center on Task Force 141, a multinational special operations unit that draws its core characters from the U.K.'s SAS, most famously with Captain John Price, Soap MacTavish, and Simon "Ghost" Riley.
Given Peter Berg's history of casting Mark Wahlberg in the lead, he is presumably eyeing his frequent collaborator for the Call of Duty movie's frontman. That naturally has many speculating that Wahlberg would play Price, the mustached commander of the One-Four-One and Modern Warfare's definitive face.
Notably, Wahlberg has never played a British character in his career, almost exclusively playing Americans with his thick Boston accent. If Paramount's take on Call of Duty does pull from the Modern Warfare series, it would be a major and controversial change for any of its leads to be anything other than British.
Despite copying Modern Warfare's timeline placement, there is every chance that Paramount opts to tell an original story in the Call of Duty realm, similar to what Weapons director Zack Cregger is doing with Resident Evil. Then again, such a direction would undoubtedly disappoint many Call of Duty enthusiasts who have been hoping to see their favorite action icons come to the big screen for decades.
If Paramount finds success with a Modern Warfare-inspired Call of Duty movie, the floodgates could open to an entire cinematic universe. The Black Ops franchise that unravels covert operations, conspiracies, and psychological warfare through the decades is ripe for a movie or TV adaptation, let alone its Zombies mythos, which is filled with surprisingly deep high-concept sci-fi horror storytelling.
