Peter Berg has reached for the phrase every adaptation of a war game eventually finds. The Call of Duty movie, he says, will be about “the cost of war.” It is a good line, and read closely it is also a precise one: the cost he describes belongs to the soldier, the man “who’s, for whatever reason, chosen to put himself between real danger and the rest of us, and the burden that these guys carry.” Whether the film will count anyone else’s bill is the question his answer leaves open.

That question is not pedantry. It runs through Berg’s own filmography, through the Modern Warfare games he is adapting, and it has already divided the critics on his newest picture. A director’s pitch is a promise, and this promise has a shape that his work has made familiar.

What Peter Berg said about the Call of Duty movie

The remarks came in an interview with ComicBook during the press junket for The Mosquito Bowl, Berg’s Second World War drama for Netflix. Asked how his war films were shaping Call of Duty, he pointed to the Modern Warfare missions and to Captain Price, Soap, Ghost and Alex. “These are complicated humans,” he said. “These are not, and no disrespect, cartoon characters or comic books.” He granted the violence, the hardware and the killing, and argued that beneath them the games are looking at what war costs the people who fight it. The film, he added, would probably be “not quite as graphically violent as Mosquito Bowl,” but would carry “a very strong soul, and consequence of war.”

Eurogamer, CBR and a run of gaming sites relayed the quotes almost word for word, and the shared framing is reassurance: the director respects the source, so the film will not be mindless spectacle. That reading is fair as far as it goes. It stops just before the interesting part.

The warrior’s burden is Berg’s signature, not a new idea

Seen as an auteur’s next move rather than a franchise hire, Berg has been making this film for years. ComicBook calls military action his signature, from The Kingdom to Lone Survivor, the Navy SEAL drama for which, Insider Gaming recalls, he aligned himself with real SEALs to understand their training. His football films grow from the same root; The Hollywood Reporter notes that Friday Night Lights and The Mosquito Bowl both began as books by Buzz Bissinger. Men under pressure, bound to one another, carrying a weight for people who will never see it. The “burden” in his Call of Duty answer is the thread that ties the whole body of work together.

Critics have just watched that thread pulled taut. Angie Han’s review of The Mosquito Bowl in The Hollywood Reporter credits combat sequences that “look expansive and authentic,” then faults a film “so invested in the idea of wartime service as an act of noble self-sacrifice” that it will not engage directly with the darker side of military culture. Her phrase for it is a “refusal to look directly at the shadows.” Nobody at MCM has seen the film, and the reviews are split: Deadline called it “one of the most effective antiwar films” its critic had ever seen. Either way, it is the yardstick Berg chose himself when he described what Call of Duty would be.

Modern Warfare already made the cost-of-war argument, and was caught out

Berg is right that the Modern Warfare games reach for weight. Writing for The Conversation, the historian John Wills of the University of Kent observed that the Modern Warfare reboot set out to depict the “moral complexity” and “burden” of military life, with the player, as the CIA operative Alex, siding with the local fighter Farah Karim against the US government. Its game director told GameSpot, as The Next Web reported, that the campaign was “about civilian collateral damage.”

The same game shows how a cost-of-war story chooses whose costs stay visible. In its mission “Highway of Death,” the player is told that “the Russians bombed it… killing the people trying to escape.” The name echoes the real Highway of Death of the Gulf War, where, as Wills and The Next Web both recount, American-led coalition forces attacked a retreating Iraqi convoy. The game handed that attack to Russia. Wills, who argues the franchise works as “soft power” for an American outlook on the world, read it as a symptom. Alex, one of the four characters Berg singles out, comes from that campaign.

The Call of Duty director who once called players “pathetic”

Berg brings a second complication. In a 2013 Esquire interview that a ResetEra user dug up this spring, relayed by Kotaku, Dark Horizons and Insider Gaming, he answered a question about war games with “Pathetic. Pathetic. Keyboard courage,” granted a “Call of Duty get-out-of-jail-free card” only to serving soldiers, and said that anyone who plays for four hours is “weak.” The ComicBook interview, as published, does not return to those remarks. Praise for the “real soul” of the Modern Warfare universe is a long way from “keyboard courage,” and players would be within their rights to ask what changed his mind.

Call of Duty movie release date, writers and what is still unknown

Paramount will release Call of Duty in cinemas on June 30, 2028, a date Berg announced by video at CinemaCon and which, TheWrap notes, coincides with the 25th anniversary of the original game. Berg directs and co-writes with Taylor Sheridan, the creator of Yellowstone and his collaborator on Hell or High Water and Wind River; the two produce with David Glasser, and Paramount and Activision are developing the film together. According to CBR, it is set in the Modern Warfare timeline, and no cast or plot has been announced. The Mosquito Bowl arrives on Netflix on November 25.

The campaign Berg is drawing on already holds the other side of the ledger. Wills lists a waterboarding scene in which the player is the victim, and two children forced to defend themselves in their own home. If Berg’s cost of war reaches the people at the far end of Captain Price’s rifle, the film will have earned its talk of a soul. If it stops at “the burden that these guys carry,” Call of Duty becomes The Mosquito Bowl’s noble sacrifice again, with the best-selling name in American gaming on the poster.

Tags: Taylor Sheridan, video game adaptations, Call of Duty, Peter Berg, The Mosquito Bowl