Norman Reedus Claims Death Stranding Sequel Is In Development, Hideo Kojima Appears To React To The News

Ryan Pearson |

May 24, 2022

Source: Death Stranding (2019), Kojima Productions

Norman Reedus may have just leaked that the sequel to Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding has started development.

In an interview with Leo Edit, Reedus was asked about his upcoming projects. This included a book, the final season of The Walking Dead: Origins, and another Death Stranding project. “We just started the second one,” Reedus revealed.

After this Reedus discussed how Guillermo Del Toro — who directed Mimic, one of Reedus’ first films and voices Deadman in Death Stranding — “called me up and said, ‘Hey, there’s a guy named Hideo Kojima, he’s gonna call you, just say yes.”

“And I go, ‘What do you mean just say yes?’ He goes, ‘Stop being an a–hole, just say yes.’ Then I was in San Diego and Hideo came with a big group of people, he’s from Tokyo, and he showed me what he was working on on a game called Silent Hill.”

Reedus continued, “I was blown away by what he was showing me, and I was like, ‘Yes, let’s do this.’ It’s not Ms. Pacman; it’s so realistic, it’s so futuristic, it’s so complicated and beautiful, and I was completely blown away.”

“It took me maybe two or three years to finish all the MoCap sessions and everything. It takes a lot of work. And then the game came out, and it just won all these awards, and it was a huge thing, so we just started part two of that,” Reedus reiterated.

Reedus’ comments were somewhat given validity by Kojima himself. Four days after the Leo Edit article, Kojima tweeted “‘Go to your private room,my friend.'”

The pictures included Kojima with a barbed wire baseball bat — likely a nod to Lucille and Negan Smith from The Walking Dead — and mock pictures of him about to strike Reedus, but otherwise light-hearted and friendly. Others commenting under the tweet proposed this was Reedus’ “punishment” for leaking the game.

In June 2020, Kojima tweeted about working alongside art director Yoji Shinkawa on his next project. Eagle-eyed fans were quick to spot some kind of ship or plane in the concept art had BRIDGES written on its side, the same company within Death Stranding that handles shipping and re-building US infrastructure.

However, Death Stranding 2 — or whatever this next game will be called — may have been revealed as early as March 2020. In a video interview with Wired (as part of their “Answers the Web’s Most Searched Questions” series), Reedus described how Del Toro encouraged him to work with Kojima, much as he did with Leo Edit.

“We did Death Standing which was a huge hit, and we’re in talks to do other stuff,” Reedus stated. However, at the time it was vague enough to have been any sort of project- such as the oft rumored Silent Hill reboot or Silent Hills revival, or an entirely new game.