The upcoming Rogue Trooper adaptation's unique animation style may employ video game engine Unreal Engine 5, but the creative team behind the movie didn't want it to look like one.
"We started working with the Unreal Engine to do the animatic, but one of the things that was really important to us was to make sure that we found that animation style that wouldn’t invite parallels being drawn to it being a video game movie. We really wanted to try and find that 2000 AD DNA," producer Stuart Fenegan told Deadline.
The movie is based on the Rogue Trooper comic strip, which has appeared in the 2000 AD comic since 1981. It stars Aneurin Barnard as the titular trooper, a super-soldier who finds himself as the sole survivor of an invasion force – and desperate to track down whoever was responsible. He's not quite alone, though, as he's joined by three of his squad mates. They may be dead, but their personalities have been stored in his gun, helmet, and rucksack.
"There was an amazing character designer called Doriana Re there who literally would plow through the comic books and keep doing different drawings and send them through to Duncan [Jones, director] and try and find that slightly stylized but not-too-caricatured look,@ he continued. "We never wanted to get into that uncanny-valley video game aesthetic. We really wanted to find that theatrical animation style for this 2000 AD universe."
"If we were going to make a comic-book movie, it should feel like a comic-book movie by the end of it," Jones added. "That’s what we were working towards. There was this amazing one-off 2000 AD book called War Machine. It had this beautiful artwork in it that was almost like this watercolor look to it. And that, as far as the look of the movie, was something I was always pushing us towards – a way to make it feel almost like it was colored with watercolors."
The movie's cast also includes Hayley Atwell, Sean Bean, Matt Berry, Jack Lowden, Jemaine Clement, Diane Morgan, and Reece Shearsmith.
Rogue Trooper was originally meant to be released in 2025, but doesn't currently have a release date. For more on what to watch, check out our guide to the other biggest upcoming movies on the way in 2026 and beyond.
