Movie adaptations of video games are usually panned by critics and swept under the rug by audiences. Plus, the Western genre died out decades ago when moviegoers realized its myths about the Old West were just that, and Westerns have struggled at the box office ever since. So, it’s unlikely that a Red Dead Redemption movie would ever get made.
But since the games each have a great story and Westerns are a wonderfully visual genre, it’s fun to imagine if Rockstar did go for a Red Dead movie. There are plenty of directors out there who are well-suited to this universe.
10 Robert Rodriguez
While he’s now best known for creating the Spy Kids franchise and adapting Frank Miller’s noir-tinged Sin City comics for the screen, Robert Rodriguez got his start in the western genre with the El Mariachi trilogy.
Grizzled antiheroes are Rodriguez’s bread and butter, from the title character in Machete to the Gecko brothers in From Dusk Till Dawn, so John Marston would be right in his wheelhouse.
9 Andrew Dominik
Andrew Dominik cemented himself as one of the foremost directors of revisionist Westerns when he deconstructed a popular Old West myth with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Plus, even with non-Westerns like Killing Them Softly, Dominik has shown his storytelling prowess and ability to depict violence in a gruesome, but stylish way.
If he reteamed with Jesse James cinematographer Roger Deakins, then the Red Dead movie’s depiction of the game’s brutal West could be breathtaking.
8 Paul Thomas Anderson
Anderson’s movies are tragic, warts-and-all portraits of their lead characters. He could make a Red Dead movie as a cinematic portrait of John Marston or Arthur Morgan with as much depth and nuance as There Will Be Blood’s portrait of Daniel Plainview.
While Anderson has never made a full-blown Western, he’s been inspired by Westerns like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre throughout his career.
7 David Leitch
All the shootouts in the Red Dead universe would mean that a movie adaptation would be even more action-packed than the average Western, so maybe an action director is what it needs.
After getting his start as an uncredited co-director of John Wick, David Leitch has quickly made a name for himself as a blockbuster action filmmaker, with Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and Hobbs & Shaw all under his belt.
6 James Mangold
It may have technically been a superhero movie, but with its parallels to Shane, Logan was a pure neo-Western. James Mangold used one genre to deconstruct another, challenging the comic book mythos by countering it with the Wild West mythos.
Mangold could give Red Dead’s John Marston the same treatment he gave Wolverine in his final big-screen appearance: a grizzled, old antihero at the end of his road, trying to forget his past and find stability.
5 The Coen Brothers
While they’re most famous for directing quirky pitch-black comedies like Fargo and Raising Arizona, the Coen brothers have also made some of the greatest Westerns in recent memory.
They’ve been all over the genre’s tonal spectrum, too, with their cerebral, nail-biting masterpiece No Country for Old Men, their contemplative remake of True Grit, and their somewhat zany anthology movie The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
4 Quentin Tarantino
If the unforgettable characters and operatic spectacles of bloodshed found in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight are anything to go by, Quentin Tarantino would make an awesome Red Dead Redemption movie.
Tarantino would be unlikely to turn a video game into a movie, but he’s said that directors have to make at least three Westerns to consider themselves a Western director and, as it stands, he’s only made two.
3 George Miller
If George Miller was tapped to helm a Red Dead Redemption movie, then he’d actually get stagecoaches and trains out in the desert and race them around and crash them and blow them up for real. He used practical effects wherever possible in Mad Max: Fury Road, possibly the greatest action movie of the decade, and glossed over the visuals with minimal CGI to sharpen them up.
The main problem with video game movies is that watching the story of a game play out isn’t as engaging as actually playing through it yourself, but with Miller’s visceral filmmaking style at the helm, a Red Dead movie could be even more lifelike than the game.
2 Lynne Ramsay
Lynne Ramsay is one of the greatest filmmakers working today. Her movies focus heavily on characters – usually pretty disturbed characters – and bring them to life with little details.
Both We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here center around questionable characters doing questionable things, and Ramsay keeps them compelling from start to finish.
1 Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood famously retired from directing Westerns after helming the perfect swansong for the genre with his masterpiece Unforgiven. After deconstructing the Western and putting it back together in Unforgiven, Eastwood resigned from the genre, fearing that he would eventually repeat himself.
But if he’d be willing to return to the genre to adapt Red Dead Redemption (which almost certainly wouldn’t happen), then he’d probably turn the story of John Marston into yet another revisionist classic.