Donald Glover Is Turning PUBG Into a Netflix Series He's Writing, Directing, and Starring In

Donald Glover is making a PUBG show. That sentence alone is worth sitting with for a second, because PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has spent nearly a decade as one of the biggest multiplayer shooters on the planet, not exactly obvious source material for prestige TV. But Netflix has confirmed a live-action series based on the Krafton game, and Glover is attached to write, direct, produce, and star in it.

He's not doing it alone. His brother Stephen Glover is co-writing and executive producing, continuing a partnership that's defined much of Donald's recent screen work. The executive producer list also includes Michael Schaefer for NEON TV, Fam Udeorji for Gilga, and Taeseok Jang and Sujin Lee for LV3H, Krafton's in-house entertainment arm, which is also helping develop and produce the show. In a press release shared with IGN, Krafton framed the project as part of a broader push to grow the PUBG franchise into "original entertainment content" beyond the game itself.

There's actually a story here

PUBG launched in 2017 as a pure multiplayer exercise: drop 100 players on an island, last one standing wins. No real narrative, just mechanics. But Krafton has since built out an extensive backstory on the game's official lore site, and it turns out there's genuine material for a writer to work with.

The fictional premise centers on a billionaire named Sergei Kalimnik, the sole survivor of a brutal Soviet attack on the island of Erangel back in 1965. According to the lore, Kalimnik lived through 17 days of conflict and watched Soviet forces try to dispose of the bodies of the dead. The trauma apparently curdled into an idea: buy the island, round up 100 people, and force them to fight to the death, recreating his own nightmare as a spectacle.

From there the concept expanded to other locations, watched over by wealthy, anonymous elites, an arrangement that invites an obvious comparison to Squid Game, where masked VIPs similarly observe deadly competitions from a safe distance. The PUBG lore goes further still, tying the whole scenario to something called "Magna Venari: The Great Hunt," a supposed tradition dating back to the early 15th century, described on the franchise's lore page as the "hunting of human prey" built around the question "Why do some survive when others do not?"

It's a lot more mythology than most people who've played PUBG probably ever noticed. And it hands Glover, whose credits include Atlanta, Community, and Swarm, something closer to a real narrative foundation than most game adaptations start with.

Video games keep going Hollywood

The PUBG series lands in the middle of a broader trend of A-list talent attaching themselves to game adaptations. Michael B. Jordan is reportedly developing a Battlefield movie alongside director Christopher McQuarrie, shopping the Electronic Arts military shooter around to studios, with Sony said to be the current frontrunner, though nothing is finalized.

What's notable about the PUBG deal isn't just that it's happening, but who's driving it. Glover isn't a hired-gun director taking a studio paycheck. He's writing, directing, producing, and starring, giving him the kind of creative control that usually determines whether a game adaptation feels like a cash grab or an actual piece of storytelling. Krafton, for its part, is signaling it wants PUBG to exist as more than a game people boot up for quick matches, treating the IP's lore as a foundation worth building on rather than an afterthought.

No release timeline, casting details beyond Glover himself, or episode count has been announced. But between Glover's involvement and the Battlefield movie circling studios, game-to-screen adaptations are clearly entering a phase where the names attached matter as much as the source material itself.