Variety today announced that New Line studios won an auction for the feature rights to Microsoft’s Gears of War. The auction included a treatment by writer Stuart Beattie, who previously wrote Collateral and Derailed and has a writing credit for the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series. A rights purchase is pretty far from a done deal for a movie in Hollywood terms, so this may or may not hit the theaters any time soon, and Gears, while involving, didn’t really have a strong story. Its still early, but it doesn’t look like this will be the movie that transcends the video game to film stigma.