Hollywood has spent the best part of a decade trying to turn Call of Duty into a film franchise, and it has taken roughly as many attempts as it does to actually finish the campaign on Veteran difficulty. Paramount Pictures and Activision have now confirmed that the live-action Call of Duty film will be written and directed by Peter Berg as reported by Deadline, with Taylor Sheridan co-writing the script, and that it is set for release on 30 June 2028. After years of false starts, the franchise that taught a generation to camp in doorways is finally getting one of its own, on the silver screen.

It is worth remembering that Activision has been here before. Back in 2015, Activision Blizzard Studios announced a full cinematic universe built around Call of Duty, with Italian director Stefano Sollima attached to helm the first instalment and a sequel script commissioned from Joe Robert Cole in 2018. By February 2020, Sollima had confirmed the project was no longer a priority, and the whole enterprise quietly disappeared, rather like a Care Package landing in the one spot nobody can reach, according to the Call of Duty Wiki's account of the film's history.

This time, the pairing looks considerably more serious. Deadline broke the news in October 2025 that Sheridan, the creator of Yellowstone and writer of Hell or High Water, would team up with Berg, director of Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon, to co-write the script, with Berg directing and Sheridan producing alongside 101 Studios' David Glasser. Between Sheridan's gift for grim family dysfunction and Berg's fondness for blowing things up with real conviction, it is hard to imagine a duo better equipped to survive a Call of Duty press junket, let alone write the film itself.

Paramount made the project official at CinemaCon in April 2026, screening a sizzle reel built largely from in-game footage and set, rather fittingly, to The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army", a tune that has been blaring out of football stadiums and Warzone lobbies alike for two decades. Producer Rob Kostich told the crowd that he and Berg were only prepared to make the film with the backing of the right studio leadership, having found that in Paramount Skydance chief David Ellison, while Berg added in a taped message that he and Sheridan felt "deeply connected to the special ops community" and wanted to bring both authenticity and scale to the project, as reported by Deadline and GeekTyrant.

The one question hanging over the whole affair was which slice of the sprawling Call of Duty back catalogue would make it to cinemas. Activision had previously surveyed fans on whether they wanted Black Ops, Zombies, or something else entirely, according to GameSpot. That question has now been answered: Variety reports that Sheridan's Call of Duty film will be set in the Modern Warfare universe, following earlier reporting that the story would adopt a modern setting, with insider Daniel Richtman even floating Mark Wahlberg as a possible lead, per a report picked up by Yahoo Entertainment. It is a sensible choice commercially, given the sub-series is the one even your nan has vaguely heard of, and the timing is neat too, arriving just as Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 4 prepares to launch in October 2026 with its own Captain Price storyline running through a Korean Peninsula conflict, as detailed on the official Call of Duty blog.

Setting the film in the Modern Warfare universe means the door is open, at least in theory, for Task Force 141: Captain John Price of the SAS, John "Soap" MacTavish, and the endlessly memeable, balaclava-clad Simon "Ghost" Riley, a character whose skull mask has arguably sold more Halloween costumes than the film industry has sold cinema tickets in recent years. No casting has been confirmed, plot details remain firmly under wraps, and production is not expected to begin until early 2027, so anyone hoping to see a first-look image of Price's moustache will need to keep waiting.

The film also will not have the genre to itself. Michael B. Jordan and Christopher McQuarrie are separately developing a Battlefield movie, giving military shooters their own mini arms race at the multiplex, as noted by Collider. Video game adaptations remain a mixed bag at the box office, though Paramount's own Sonic the Hedgehog franchise proved the format can work when handled with care, which is presumably the pep talk Sheridan and Berg are giving each other on difficult days.

None of this happens in a vacuum for the community that has quietly turned Modern Warfare's arsenal into a real-world hobby. Airsoft players have spent years replicating the game's loadouts down to the last rail attachment, with fans filmed recreating the Gunfight multiplayer mode shot-for-shot on real airsoft courts, while retailers such as Gunfire note that plenty of players picked up a replica rifle for the first time purely because of what they had seen on screen in a Call of Duty campaign. Popular Airsoft have spent years cataloguing fan-made short films and replica builds directly inspired by Modern Warfare's Task Force 141. A big-budget film with genuine stunt work and gunfights choreographed for the cinema, rather than a controller, seems likely to send another wave of newly enthusiastic "operators" down to their local airsoft site, kitted out in more plate carriers than tactical sense.

For now, Call of Duty fans have a release date, a director and writer with serious pedigree, and confirmation that the film will live in the Modern Warfare world rather than, say, the zombie-infested corners of the franchise. What they do not have yet is a cast, a trailer, or any real sense of plot, so treat every rumour between now and 2028 with the same scepticism you would apply to a teammate insisting they definitely heard footsteps. Two years is a long time in this franchise's world, and if the games are any guide, at least one map will get reworked before release.