Hideo Kojima has shared that he set aside a dark superhero project he had been thinking of making after discovering it had a close similarity to The Boys, the Amazon series currently airing its third season.
In a series of tweets, Kojima revealed that the project — which may have been a film, rather than a game — would have been “a buddy (male/female) thing with a special detective squad facing off against legendary heroes behind the scenes.” The Boys, based on a comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, sees a team of underground vigilantes taking on a corrupt, corporate-owned superhero enterprise.
“I watched a few episodes that were delivered at the time when I was about to start a project that I had been warming up for a long time, and put it on hold because the concept was similar,” Kojima revealed. “I was thinking of Mads as the lead,” he said, referring to his Death Stranding star and man-crush Mads Mikkelsen. When is Kojima not thinking of Mads?
“Today, when superheroes continue to be mass-produced in the entertainment industry, this drama was to be a radical hard-boiled action film, neither hero nor villain, with an astonishingly black joke setup and a worldview that is the opposite of what we are used to,” Kojima said. Kojima has long harbored ambitions as a filmmaker, and his studio Kojima Productions says it is exploring “various possibilities with games, movies, and music.”
“The concept was the same, a black ‘anti-hero’ story in which a superhero and a human face off,” Kojima said a little later, after catching up with the eight-episode first season. “But the setting, gimmicks, and tone [of The Boys] were very different from what I had in mind for my previous project.”
It seems this maybe-Mads-starring maybe-film never saw active production, however. “Well, what I had planned stayed in my mind only, so I didn’t incur any cost for labor, material, research, or anything like that,” Kojima said.
Kojima Productions is currently working on a new game with Xbox Game Studios, as well as a second game that could well be a sequel to Death Stranding.