After being announced 20 years ago, Tom Hardy's "awesome" Splinter Cell movie is now officially dead

The Splinter Cell movie was first announced back in 2004 with a trailer on the Chaos Theory disc. It later entered development with Tom Hardy in talks to star in 2012, but then everything went very quiet with the latest update coming in 2015 when Hardy himself announced the movie would be released in 2017.

Now, we have official confirmation from producer Basil Iwanyk that the project is dead. "That movie would have been awesome," he told The Direct. "Just couldn't get it right, script-wise, budget-wise. But it was going to be great. We had a million different versions of it, but it was going to be hardcore and awesome. That's one of the ones that got away, which is really sad."

Fans have been reacting to the long overdue news, admitting that they'd pretty much thought as much. "I've long since assumed the movie was very dead. It's too bad though. I think Splinter Cell would bring a fairly unique approach to the spy genre. He's not really Bond, Bourne or anything I've seen before," one wrote on Reddit as a second added: "Why is it so hard to get more Splinter Cell :(". A third argued: "How hard can this be? Jack Ryan meets Batman. C'mon this is a solved problem already." Another argued: "I think it'll work better as a series tbh".

Splinter Cell has had a hard run getting into live-action, but a Netflix animated show is on the way. Called Splinter Cell: Death Watch, the project has been described as a "sharp new take on modern espionage in the hybrid-war era". X-Men's Liev Schreiber voices Sam Fisher in the show, which has been created by Nobody and John Wick writer Derek Kolstad.

For more upcoming movies, check out our guide to all the upcoming video game adaptations on the way in 2024 and beyond.