Call of Duty's director explains that his film will be all about the 'consequence of war' and not just a shoot-'em-up

The Call of Duty movie officially became a thing earlier this year, and aside from making fans of Black Ops cry out in pain it promised "an authentic and exciting" take on the Modern Warfare games. Helmed by director Peter Berg who's known for films like Lone Survivor, Battleship, and The Mosquito Bowl, he's now explained a little more about what we can expect from this movie.

"This is not just 'Hey, let’s shoot them all up and shoot popcorn!'", Bergs says in an interview with Comicbook. "There’s a soul underneath it, that I understand and [Call of Duty's co-writer and producer] Taylor Sheridan understands, [it's] not quite as graphically violent as Mosquito Bowl, but there will be a very strong soul, and consequence of war within the film, called 'duty.'"

Modern Warfare is pretty generic, even for Call of Duty, but Berg insists that it's exactly what the film needs, specifically its characters: "Captain Price, and Soap, and Ghost, and Alex—these are complicated humans." I'm certainly intrigued to see how Berg goes about adapting these iconic characters and their stories for the silver screen although any actor will have something of a mountain to climb to win over hardcore fans.

"These are not—and no disrespect—cartoon characters or comic books," Berg says. "These are very nuanced storylines; like, there’s a real soul to the Modern Warfare universe… And, yes, there’s violence, and there’s hardware, and equipment, and there's killing—but underneath it I think the game, and the craters of the game, are really looking at the cost of war, the cost of having to be a warrior who’s, for whatever reason, chosen to put himself between real danger and the rest of us, and the burden that these guys carry."

Berg's Call of Duty film is set to release June 30, 2028—quite a while away. But if you look at Activision's release schedule it lines up with the games quite nicely. We've just had Modern Warfare 4's release so presumably that means we will be getting another Black Ops next year and then Modern Warfare the year after; just in time to compare it to Berg's creation.