Eight years ago, producer/director J.J. Abrams revealed that he intended to work with gaming giant Valve on a film based on the celebrated physics puzzle video game “Portal”.
For years nothing ever really seemed to come of it, the project vanishing into development hell.
That changed this week as IGN offered an update on the project’s status and indicates it is not only still alive, but has recently got some fire underneath it:
“We actually do have a script that’s being written for the ‘Portal’ movie now at [Warner Bros]. We’re really excited about the take and the pitch, so it feels like that thing is finally on the rails.
[Its] got enormous potential for a lot of reasons, one of which is because of the limited narrative of the game, as ingeniously told as it is, the potential of it is so huge. It’s gonna be super fun.”
No writer has been revealed at this point, but Abrams confirmed that though Bad Robot is working on “Portal,” they’re not working on an adaptation of Valve’s most iconic franchise “Half-Life”.
The “Portal” games follow a woman, Chell, forced to undergo a series of tests within the Aperture Science Enrichment Center run by a malicious artificial intelligence named GLaDOS.
Most of the tests involve using a “portal gun” creating a human-sized wormhole-esque connection between two flat surfaces allowing objects or the player themselves to move through while conserving their momentum. Two titles have been released to date, both of which scored some of the best game review scores of all time.