The Death Stranding Anime Just Found The Perfect Writer

Death Stranding has become a cult hit for a faction of video game players, but its upcoming live-action adaptation, courtesy of A24, is already being treated with skepticism. For all its narrative complexity, Hideo Kojima’s 2019 game already feels a lot like a movie. It boasts a cast of incredible actors like Léa Seydoux, Mads Mikkelsen, and Margaret Qualley — and even some directors, like Guillermo del Toro and Nicholas Winding Refn. Their performances ground Kojima’s heady sci-fi vision with the intimacy of a smaller-scale production. The idea of a film adaptation without its original cast feels callous, not to mention unnecessary.

Kojima hasn’t revealed much about the live-action remake, only that it’ll tell the story of Death Stranding in a way that can only be told on film. That may be enough to satisfy purists for the time being, but for those who might prefer a new story set in the world of the game, Kojima’s got you covered, too. The game developer announced his plans to spearhead a Death Stranding anime in a recent interview with Vogue Japan. It wasn’t clear if this would be a sequel, a spinoff, or another remake of the game — but now that Kojima has found a writer to pen the script, we now have a better idea of his plans for the project.

Kojima Productions and the animation company Line Mileage have tapped Aaron Guzikowski to write the screenplay for the Death Stranding anime. Guzikowski may be most notable for writing Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 film Prisoners, but he also created one of HBO’s most intriguing sci-fi shows, Raised by Wolves. Like Death Stranding, the series was post-apocalyptic in scope and ambitious, even unwieldy, in its story. It didn’t get the chance to gain the audience it deserved in its short time on the air, but Guzikowski’s work on the series makes him an ideal candidate for a sci-fi world as weird as Death Stranding.

Per Deadline, Guzikowski is writing a new story couched in the world of Kojima’s game. The anime will be set in the immediate aftermath of the “Death Stranding,” a cataclysmic event that shattered the world and brought the dead into the land of the living. After a series of mysterious explosions, what was left of humanity holed up in underground communities called Knots, avoiding trapped souls called BTs (“Beached Things”) with the power to trigger further annihilation.

The game digs deep into the dangers of this new world, and Kojima will likely explore more consequences of the Death Stranding in its sequel, On the Beach — but the anime has the potential to show audiences how it all began, and how society rebuilt after the apocalypse. If nothing else, it’ll help to justify Kojima’s push into a different medium: Even if the A24 film doesn’t meet fans’ expectations, a new story set in the same world is a fine consolation prize.