Metro 2033 will get a film adaptation with Russia’s Gazprom Media

Russia’s Gazprom Media is working on a film adaptation for the post-apocalyptic sci-fi franchise Metro 2033.

Dmitry Glukhovsky’s trilogy of Metro novels has been a global best-seller, and the series was turned into a hit series of first-person shooter video games by 4A Games and publishers THQ. The novels, and games, are set in the ruins of Moscow following a nuclear war, with survivors forced to live in the city’s underground subway tunnels.

There had been plans in the past for film adaptations, but Dmitry Glukhovsky was never happy with ideas to set it in America.

“Metro 2033 is my first novel. It played a very special role in my life, and, despite getting numerous offers to screen it, I turned them all down for over 10 years,” Glukhovsky said in a statement. “But now I finally met a team that I can entrust Metro with. Our ambitions turned out to be similar: to create a world-class blockbuster and stun even those who have read the trilogy and know it by heart.”

The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind. But the last remains of civilisation have already become a distant memory, the stuff of myth and legend.

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More than 20 years have passed since the last plane took off from the earth. Rusted railways lead into emptiness. The ether is void and the airwaves echo to a soulless howling where previously the frequencies were full of news from Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms. Mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. Man’s time is over.

A few score thousand survivors live on, not knowing whether they are the only ones left on earth. They live in the Moscow Metro – the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. It is humanity’s last refuge. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters – or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. It is a world without a tomorrow, with no room for dreams, plans, hopes. Feelings have given way to instinct – the most important of which is survival. Survival at any price.

THR had the news.

Valery Fedorovich, who will produce Metro 2033, said the books and video games have become “embedded in the cultural code of sci-fi fans and gamers all over the planet.” Fedorovich called Metro 2033 “a dream project” and said it was the “most ambitious and large-scale film” every launched by Gazprom Media.