Sea of Thieves is a multiplayer action-adventure game where players venture out onto the high seas, either alone or with a group of other players. They can go on pirate adventures, engage in naval battles, collect treasure, and do whatever else they feel like doing as part of this open-ended experience. Sea of Thieves first came out on Windows and Xbox One in 2018, and developer Rare has supported it with ongoing content ever since. Entertainment Weekly reports that it’s being adapted into a movie.
Although there are story events in Sea of Thieves, it doesn’t have a traditional narrative that could be easily adapted as a movie. Matt Booty, the Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer at Xbox, doesn’t see that as a problem. “The main character of a Sea of Thieves game is actually the player and the community,” he said. “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.”
Minecraft, another Xbox franchise, doesn’t have a straightforward plot, either, but that didn’t stop A Minecraft Movie from breaking box-office records in 2025. And although the Sea of Thieves movie doesn’t have a director yet, Destin Daniel Cretton is on board as a producer. He has relevant experience working within big franchises, having directed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings as well as the upcoming movie Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Destin Daniel Cretton
There Are Over a Dozen Xbox Adaptations in the Works
While video game adaptations used to be waved away as shoddy cash grabs, they’re increasingly becoming a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was the first movie to make over $1 billion at the box office. The Last of Us is a prestigious HBO drama, and there are very exciting projects on the horizon.
Xbox wants in. According to EW, there are over a dozen adaptations based on Xbox games in the works, and we only know about eight of them:
The Sea of Thieves movie
A Minecraft Movie Squared, the sequel to A Minecraft Movie
A Minecraft animated series for Netflix
A live-action Gears of War movie
A Gears of War animated series for Netflix
A Wolfenstein live-action TV show on Prime Video
A new season of Fallout, which wrapped up its second season on Prime Video earlier this year
A Fallout reality show called Fallout Shelter
“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,” said Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. “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.”
The Sea of Thieves movie does not yet have a release date.
Release Date
July 23, 2027
Prequel(s)
A Minecraft Movie