Although Prime Video’s Fallout series is currently just two seasons long, the decision to set the show within the same continuity as the games means there’s far more lore to explore than it initially seems. Still, as vast as deceptively vast as the Fallout franchise is, an upcoming A24 movie provides a window into a far more complex video game saga. The franchise in question is far newer than Fallout and yet has somehow caught up with the sheer amount of worldbuilding boasted by Fallout’s post-apocalyptic storyline.
The Death Stranding franchise began with the 2019 video game. It shares Fallout‘s penchant for a dystopian future, but lacks the irreverent quirky elements. At the very least, Death Stranding does irrelevance and quirkiness incredibly differently. While initially criticized for the game’s focus on simply traversing challenging terrain to deliver packages, the success of 2025’s Death Stranding 2: On the Beach proved there’s an ongoing demand for the enthralling universe from Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima. That said, A24 clearly saw promise in Death Stranding before then, announcing the plan in 2022 to add a movie to the expanding property. Even with so few confirmed details, I’m incredibly excited about it.
A24’s ‘Death Stranding’ Movie Will Further Broaden an Already Impressive Sci-Fi Universe
While Fallout isn’t without its more high-concept moments, the general idea of surviving in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland is fairly straightforward. The franchise has explored its world since 1997, when the first game was published. There have been some big plot twists and interesting reveals about key events in the Fallout timeline, but I’ve never found it all that cerebral or tricky to follow. The Amazon show made things especially accessible, given that it was welcoming a new audience to a world with a staggering amount of pre-existing canon, which was still directly relevant. Death Stranding doesn’t have the luxury of a decades-long history, but it doesn’t need it.
The first game is coming up to its 7th anniversary. Even that first installment is bursting at the seams with mind-bending lore that is, by design, almost impossible to fully comprehend. The game’s premise of making long and arduous trips between key locations isn’t always conducive to narrative exposition or explaining the shockingly dense canon. Sure, the cutscenes do a lot of the heavy lifting, but even those aren’t sufficient. Instead, much of the worldbuilding takes place in emails that can be read by the player and long conversations with the story’s other characters. This lore overload does slow down a little in On the Beach, given that introductions have been made, but doesn’t stop entirely.
“I’m writing the script right now and hopefully almost done with that and really excited to dive into it. I’ve been talking to Kojima and A24 a lot about it. They’ve read a draft. We’re working on some revisions together, and they all seem super excited and happy with it. Kojima has been really generous in letting me play in his world but letting me tell a story with my own characters and my own sort of corner of this world, but keeping it honest to the game and doing something that fans will really like. So it’s been a great process so far, and I’m really excited to share it.”
– Director Michael Sarnoski speaking with IGN about his Death Stranding movie script.
The laws of the Death Stranding universe are so out there that I struggle to see how A24 could make them work on the big screen. Certain elements of the worldbuilding are left intentionally vague in the games. Sometimes, it’s because it’s more exciting not to have all the answers, and other times, it’s because the characters don’t fully understand what’s going on themselves. This is in stark contrast to Fallout, which often treats the mysteries of its canon as questions that need urgent answers. Because Death Stranding relishes the terrifying ambiguity of it all, there are inevitably more questions than answers.
There is also an animated feature and animated TV series in production, which will flesh out Death Stranding even further.
To make things even more intimidating for newcomers, the upcoming A24 movie will adopt the Fallout approach by setting the Death Stranding live-action movie in the exact same timeline as the games, but also focusing on new characters in a new corner of Kojima’s universe. It won’t be a retelling of the source material, but rather a canonical extension of it. While I assume the script will account for the fact that viewers will need to be filled in on key parts of the Death Stranding lore, there’s no way the movie can cover all the same ground as the games while also telling its own story – to get a more complete picture, I can only assume that playing the games will remain incredibly necessary.
- Writers
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Hideo Kojima
- Producers
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Hideo Kojima, Allan Ungar
- Franchise(s)
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Death Stranding
