In 2011, Staples and screenwriter Paul Haggis wrote the script for the video game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3,[2] which was the largest entertainment release in history at the time.[3]
On October 25, 2013, Deadline announced that Ben Affleck and Warner Bros had hired Staples to write a geopolitical thriller about a team of mercenaries in Eastern Congo for Affleck to star in and direct.[4] The following year, Warner announced that Staples had been hired to write a movie set in the world of illicit animal trafficking for Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, and Tobey Maguire to produce and star in.[5]
Will's first novel, Animals, a thriller about global animal trafficking, organized crime and a deadly pandemic, was released on March 30, 2021.[9]
Two of his screenplays have appeared on The Black List, an annual list compiled by Hollywood executives of their favorite unproduced screenplays – once for his adaptation of the book King of Heists by J. North Conway, and again for Landslide, an adaptation of the book How to Break a Terrorist, co-written with Tony Camerino.[10][11]