Activision has confirmed the Call of Duty movie setting, and it's not what I'd have picked

I'm not sure who thinks we need a Call of Duty movie, but it's officially a thing, and it's coming out on June 30, 2028. It's "an authentic and exciting experience for longtime fans and newcomers alike." While this tidbit was confirmed earlier in the year, Activision and Paramount gave us little more than that in the months since. The big question was whether it will be set in the Modern Warfare or Black Ops universe, or something more unexpected, like WW2, Advanced Warfare, or Infinite Warfare (although probably not that last one).

The answer is it's going to be set in the Modern Warfare timeline, revealed with a very short teaser trailer at FanaticsFest over the weekend. With Modern Warfare 4 coming up this October, presumably a Black Ops game next year, and then another Modern Warfare game in 2028, it lines up.

Even as far as Call of Duty goes, Modern Warfare is easily the most generic setting Activision and Paramount could have picked. It's basically already a pastiche of bog-standard military films diluted into a game. At least Black Ops plays with perception, history, and tech to add something on top. While we're yet to get any specifics, I bet we'll see the usual Modern Warfare suspects—Captain Price, Ghost, and co.—bending the rules to do what they do best, which is usually a lot of war crimes, truth be told. I wouldn't be surprised to see the actors from the game reprise their roles, even—Captain Price actor Barry Sloane recently popped up as Ser Adrian Redfort in House of the Dragon.

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It's previously been revealed that Peter Berg will be helming the project. I don't expect you to remember, but he directed things like Battleship, Deepwater Horizon, and Spencer Confidential, among others. More notably, he directed Lone Survivor in 2013, which is about a group of soldiers on a mission to eliminate a Taliban leader—sounds rather Call of Duty to me.

In a 2013 interview, Berg made his views on military videogames pretty clear, calling them "pathetic."

"Can't stand it. The only people that I give a Call of Duty get-out-of-jail-free card to is the military. They're out there serving and they're bored and they want to entertain themselves? Okay, maybe. Kids? Uh-uh."

So despite his track record for making war films portraying the US military as Hollywood heroes, military shooters like Call of Duty aren't up to his standards. But that was 13 years ago, and now he's got a gig turning those games into a movie, so perhaps he's changed his mind.

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