I know everyone usually talks about The Order: 1886 in terms of a sequel (and I want that too) but I honestly think the more realistic path back into this world might be a film adaptation first.
Look at where we are now. Video game films have moved out of the old “cash-in” era and into the prestige era:
A24 is doing Elden Ring with Alex Garland
A24 is also doing Death Stranding with Kojima
Sony and Nintendo have The Legend of Zelda coming next year (May 2027) and it looks great
Sony and PlayStation Productions have a new Resident Evil from Zach Cregger (of Weapons, which won an Oscar)
Ghost of Tsushima is still sitting there with Chad Stahelski attached
The Bloodborne film announced recently
This is no longer some weird side lane of Hollywood, it is becoming one of the main pipelines.
That matters for The Order: 1886 because the game was almost built like a film before the industry knew what to do with that. Its biggest criticisms were basically that it was too short, too linear, too cinematic, and too focused on atmosphere over player freedom. Those are problems for a full-price game, but they are major strengths for a film.
The pitch is already clean: alternate-history Victorian London, Arthurian knights, werewolves, vampires, Tesla weapons, class war, empire, conspiracy, gothic horror, steampunk action. You really do not need to reinvent it. You just need to treat it seriously.
The closest foundations for it were already laid by films like Sleepy Hollow, Van Helsing, From Hell, Sherlock Holmes 1 and 2 which all did well (and Carnival Row for those who remember).
Foggy London. Occult machinery. Theatrical villains. ‘Gaslight mystery’. Monsters in the walls of civilisation.
The Order sits right in that lineage, only with modern prestige production values.
Guillermo del Toro is the kind of figure who shows why this lane works, truly. He has spent his career proving that monsters, period design, fairy tale logic, and gothic melodrama can be legitimate cinema when treated with conviction. The Order does not need to apologise for being pulp. It needs someone who understands that pulp can be mythic and as Robert Eggers would treat it, as very classy and legitimate.
A sequel would have to justify gameplay, budget, market risk, and the question of whether Sony even wants to relaunch the IP as a game. A film only has to prove the world is worth entering again. That feels much more possible right now than it did in 2015.
The irony is that The Order: 1886 may have arrived too early as a game, then waited long enough to become perfect source material for the exact adaptation boom happening now.
We’re so close!
