There’s a case to be made that Alan Ritchson is the last actor Hollywood has successfully built into an action star the old way, through sheer physical presence and a signature role rather than franchise inheritance. Reacher turned him from a journeyman with Smallville and Titans credits into one of the most-watched leading men on television, and the movie business has spent the last few years figuring out what to do with that.
The answer so far has been Guy Ritchie, twice, with The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and this year’s cop thriller Playdirty, plus a Fast X detour and an upcoming War Machine. What’s been missing from that run is the thing every action star of his build eventually gets handed, which is a big-canvas sci-fi franchise. The role he’s now circling fits that description too well, and it comes from a games studio whose screen adaptations have, lately at least, been performing extremely well.
Per Deadline, Ritchson is in talks to star in the live-action Helldivers movie that Sony’s PlayStation Productions is developing based on Arrowhead Game Studios’ shooter. Details on his character are being kept quiet, but Jason Momoa had been attached to lead Helldivers since early this year; he departed the project in June, with sources telling The Hollywood Reporter the split came down to “creative differences.”
Momoa hardly needs the gig, given he’s fronting October’s Street Fighter and has a Minecraft sequel on his slate, but his exit left Sony and director Justin Lin needing a new anchor for a movie already dated for Nov. 10, 2027. That timeline probably explains why the studio moved this quickly on Ritchson, and it’s hard not to notice the two actors share a Fast X connection and roughly the same silhouette. Whatever the creative disagreements were, the physical brief for the part clearly hasn’t changed.
For anyone not already familiar with it, Helldivers 2 was widely seen as one of gaming’s bigger breakout stories of 2024. Arrowhead’s co-op shooter sends squads of highly expendable soldiers onto hostile planets to spread “managed democracy” in service of Super Earth, a fascistic bureaucracy that the game appears to present as overt satire, and it quickly became PlayStation’s fastest-selling title, moving more than 12 million copies in its opening weeks.
The obvious comparison is Starship Troopers, right down to the propaganda aesthetics, and much of the community’s appeal seems to rest in the friendly fire chaos and the deliberately disposable nature of its troopers. Any film adaptation that tries to play the premise entirely straight would likely risk missing what players actually respond to, which is presumably one of the first issues Sony has had to consider. Then again, actors fall out of early negotiations all the time, so nothing here appears locked in just yet. But if the deal does close, it would seem to give Ritchson the kind of franchise-scale vehicle his post-Reacher career has been building toward.
- Birthdate
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November 28, 1982
- Birthplace
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Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA
