I've been wondering where this project is and what's happening with it, and Cinematical just let me know.

Latino Review has a feature on screenwriter Stuart Beattie's script for the upcoming videogame movie Splinter Cell. They share a long and involved script review for your reading pleasure...

...and they are right, we want short, sharp bursts of information nowadays, so they've kindly summed it all up for us.

Script is hot, with lots of wacky stealth-spy adventures in many foreign lands. It flows just like the videogame, with Sam Fisher traveling from place to place, picking up clues and being all super-spy while doing it. If you like the videogame, you will like this script...“Hooray,” I hear you fans thinking. “Finally, a video game movie that might be worth while...

Well, I don't know. Okay the review says the script is good, and Latino Review rant about the needless rewrites and notes made to them before they become mediocre and often just plain crap movies, so what's to say this won't go the same way? It already looks like it with another writer lined up to start the rewrites.

I'm just not sure how this will turn out, not because the original idea came from a videogame, but because Hollywood are just messing up more than they shine with. I'm sure there's a huge percentage of bad or mediocre movies that really read well on script, but come to making time and money conversations...Is it because the script writers get paid for their finished article.

It's about how sellable the script is, and that's based on how well it reads, so a script that reads great means lots of bidding and a big sale. With the making of the movie, the budget is assigned up front and everything else after that fits into those parameters, i.e. $0 - $12million. The creative work is in at the script end, and the financial budgetry side is the making of...it's that mismatch that means the actual movie falls below the estimation of the script.