There’s only one thing guaranteed to fail to live up to expectations more than a movie based on a video game. That’d be a video game based on a movie. Witness Street Fighter: The Movie: The Video Game for a true Ouroboros of awful — since it somehow manages to be both. Just don’t do it, man. Sony doesn’t like the idea of poor conversions of any sort any more, we reckon, which might be why the company has begun PlayStation Productions. Guess what they do?
If you guessed ‘walk around poking people who own PlayStations’, what were you thinking? PlayStation Productions has been launched with the intention of making movies and series using Sony’s catalogue of video game properties. God of War, Uncharted, Days Gone, Horizon: Zero Dawn? Yeah, we’d watch that lot, especially if the game developers have had input from the beginning.
For the players?
Speaking to Hollywood Reporter, Sony Interactive Entertainment chairman Shawn Layden said “We’ve got 25 years of game development experience and that’s created 25 years of great games, franchises and stories. We feel that now is a good time to look at other media opportunities across streaming or film or television to give our worlds life in another spectrum.”
As for how PlayStation Productions will avoid falling into the whole game-to-movie conversion trap? Layden added that “…you don’t. What you do is you take that ethos you write from there specifically for the film audience. You don’t try to retell the game in a movie.” Which sounds like a great approach on paper, though it remains to be seen whether the approach would pull through both game and movie fans. We’d like to think that is the case.
It appears that there are films in production already, though there isn’t an indication what properties those are or even what format they’ll take. Whatever they are (Uncharted, please!), we just hope they don’t suck. Like, Ratchet and Clank was okay but it could have been far, far better. The same can be said of many recent game adaptations, from Assassin’s Creed to Warcraft. Which is just what Sony and PlayStation Productions is hoping to avoid.
Source: Hollywood Reporter