Vin Diesel's 'Wheelman' Game Becoming a Movie

Vin Diesel might be driving fast in another movie - the video game Wheelman is coming soon to a theater near you. The game came out last month and conveniently enough, Diesel was its star and a producer. Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Transformers) will produce the film with Diesel and John Singleton will direct the adaptation about a driver who comes out of retirement to protect a woman from his past. Variety says that Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell rewrote the first script by Rich Wilkes. The history on the Wheelman movie is pretty interesting, actually. Sumner Redstone wears the crown at Paramount and owned Midway Games for a few years. His idea was always to release the game and the movie fairly close together, so they were actually kind of developed in sync. Redstone sold Midway late last year (for less than you and your buddies could probably scrape together) and the game shifted to Ubisoft. But the arrangement for the movie remained in place and now it's moving foward. There's no target date yet, but it does seem as though the movie is getting off the ground pretty quickly and with Diesel's recent huge hit with Fast & Furious, expect the studio to try cashing in sooner than later.

Comments

[Vince]

There were actually plans for "Wheelman" to be a movie before it became a game, then they started development on the game before they made the movie and now...well, you get the idea. They had the same plans for a movie based on "Spy Hunter" with The Rock in the lead role, but by the time the game rolled around, the movie was dead in the water.

oh and *spoiler alert* Vin Diesel's character in the game is an undercover cop hellbent on taking down drug cartels/gangs in Barcelona...sound familiar, like the first "Fast and the Furious" movie perhaps (or all of them really)? So yeah, if this becomes a movie, we'll have already seen it. 4 times.