Work on the Metro 2033 film that was announced in 2016 has been halted and the rights have reverted to Dmitry Glukhovsky, the author of the 2005 novel on which the movie was meant to be based. The reason, Glukhovsky told VG247, is that scriptwriter F. Scott Frazier had intended to "Americanize" the setting by moving it from Moscow to Washington DC, and it just wasn't working out. (Which is a nice way of saying that it sounds like it would have been awful.)
"A lot of things didn't work out in Washington DC," Glukhovsky said. "In Washington DC, Nazis don't work, Communists don't work at all, and the Dark Ones don't work. Washington DC is a black city basically. That's not at all the allusion I want to have, it's a metaphor of general xenophobia but it's not a comment on African Americans at all. So it didn't work."
"With Metro Last Light and Metro 2033—the books and the games—selling millions and millions of copies worldwide, it's probably not as improbable now that people would accept a story happening in Moscow because that's going to be the unique selling point," he said. "We've seen the American version of apocalypse a lot of times and the audience that like the genre are educated and saturated and not really wishing to get anymore of that."
PCGAMER
I agree with Glukhovsky in this.
