Anthony Mackie will be hanging up his Captain America shield — temporarily — and putting on his producer hat for a series in which he’ll star based on Sony PlayStation’s popular Twisted Metal video games.
The games center on tricked-out vehicles and burned-out drivers going at each other in a post-apocalyptic world, though the half-hour, live-action series will be more fleshed out than that.
Executive-produced by Deadpool and Zombieland screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and written by co-executive producer and Cobra Kai writer Michael Jonathan Smith, the series will have Mackie playing John Doe, a motor-mouthed, amnesiac milkman who must travel across the wasteland in his souped up milk truck, to deliver an important package to win a chance at a better life.
“With the help of a trigger-happy car thief, he’ll face savage marauders driving vehicles of destruction and other dangers of the open road, including a deranged clown who drives an all too familiar ice cream truck,” Sony Television explained in a release obtained by ABC Audio.
That flame-headed clown, gamers know, is the marauder Sweet Tooth.
“We’ve been big fans of Anthony’s phenomenal body of work over the years and knew he was the only actor who could play a character as complex, funny and compelling as John Doe,” said Glenn Adilman, executive vice president of comedy development at Sony Pictures Television. “Fortunately for us, he agreed.”
Twisted Metal is the second high-profile PlayStation game getting the TV series treatment: The Last of Us is currently in production for HBO, from Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin and Game of Thrones executive producer Carolyn Strauss. That series will star two GOT vets: Pedro Pascal, also known from The Mandalorian, and Bella Ramsey.
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