Avast me hearties! If ye are craving more pirate tales from Hollywood after Pirates of the Caribbean, ye’ll be pleased to know that Xbox is eager to provide.
As Entertainment Weekly previously reported, Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Xbox, has a plan: To make Xbox not just the biggest gaming company in the world, but the biggest entertainment company. With that vision in mind, the confirmation from EW that Rare’s action-adventure pirate sandbox game Sea of Thieves is being adapted into a live-action movie isn’t all that surprising.
While a director for the Sea of Thieves movie has not yet been set, EW revealed that Marvel’s Destin Daniel Cretton, the director behind the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day, as well as Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, will serve as the movie’s producer through his multimedia production company, Hisako.
Xbox has previously announced several TV and movie adaptation projects, such as an animated Minecraft series at Netflix, a live-action movie and animated series based on Gears of War (also at Netflix), a Wolfenstein live-action TV show at Amazon, as well as a reality TV show based on the mobile game, Fallout Shelter.
Adaptations of Xbox games, such as Fallout and A Minecraft Movie, have already been incredibly successful, which has us even more eager to see what a Sea of Thieves live-action movie will offer audiences. After all, one of the defining features of the game is that it’s an open-world sandbox, where the goal is to explore the world as a pirate, and the story is forged through the various tasks, battles, and other players that you meet along the way. It’s not necessarily an IP with rich lore that’s easy to adapt.
It’s a hurdle that Matt Booty, executive vice president and chief content officer at Xbox, is both aware of and eager to overcome.
“The main character of a Sea of Thieves game is actually the player and the community,” Booty tells EW. “So if you sit down to think about Sea of Thieves, it’s not, ‘Who are the main characters? What’s the plot?’ It’s a super social game, but there’s a tone to Sea of Thieves. It’s built on a very cooperative community, so you can start to sense what that’s going to be like.”
Like Sea of Thieves, Minecraft prioritized social play over linear narrative, but that didn’t stop the film adaptation from quickly earning the respect and admiration of audiences, raking in $163 million in its opening week alone. With a sequel on the way, it’s clear that Xbox is picking IPs that have a strong social element to them — even Wolfenstein allowed for co-op and multiplayer in later entries — though whether due to the built-in audience appeal or the challenge of creating something out of very little, it’s hard to say.
Regardless, Xbox’s previous successes have put the wind in the company’s sails, and, according to EW, the company is eager to “leverage more IP” with Hollywood.
“You won’t see us try to become the biggest linear provider in the world or anything like that, but I think great games are culture, and culture is entertainment,” Sharma tells EW. “If you think about it, we’ve got the number two show of all time on Amazon [Fallout], Minecraft was top 5 in 2025, Call of Duty is bigger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So it all measures. [There’s] more appetite to work with us on titles than ever before.”
