Sony Interactive Entertainment is looking to break the video game curse. Video game movies may have a bad track record in Hollywood, but that won’t stop the video game subsidiary of Sony from launching its very own production company, Playstation Productions, to adapt its extensive catalogue of beloved video games for the big and small screen.
The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Sony Interactive is launching Playstation Productions, a production studio devoted to adapting best-selling Sony video games titles like Metal Gear Solid, Uncharted, God of War, The Last of Us for TV and film. The new enterprise will be led by Asad Qizilbash and overseen by the chairman of Worldwide Studios at SIE, Shawn Layden, and is “already in production on its first slate of projects and has set up shop on the Sony Studios lot in Culver City.”
Sony Interactive has a library of more than 100 original properties, some of which have already made their way to the big screen to mixed reception, like the long-running Tomb Raider series. But Sony Interactive believes that in their own hands, they could have better luck at breaking the video game movie curse.
“Instead of licensing our IP out to studios, we felt the better approach was for us to develop and produce for ourselves,” Qizilbash told THR. “One, because we’re more familiar, but also because we know what the PlayStation community loves.”
Unlike most video game adaptations that are usually developed when a game studio licenses its IP out to a movie studio, Sony will be producing these projects in-house through Playstation Productions, with sister company Sony Studios distributing the films. This will perhaps help them avoid disasters like “big budget efforts like 2016’s Assassin’s Creed or Warcraft [that] bombed at the box office and earned weak reviews” — failures that have been attributed to Hollywood misunderstanding the appeal of the video games. Layden wants to instead focus on “ethos” from the game and avoid retelling a story in a way that doesn’t translate well to TV or film.
It’s interesting that Sony Interactive launched its own production studio to adapt its video game titles as opposed to handing it over to Sony Studios, but Qizilbash believes that these adaptations are best in the hands of people who know video games. It seems like they hope Playstation Productions will break into Hollywood in a big way, with Qizilbash noting that he has talked to Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige “to really get an understanding of the industry.”
So could this mean we finally get that Last of Us adaptation? With the launch of Playstation Productions and the box office success of Detective Pikachu, could the era of terrible video game adaptations be coming to an end? That’s something we’ll have to wait and see to find out, but for now, look forward to that iconic Playstation logo making its way to your movie theater.
The post Sony Launches Playstation Productions Studio to Adapt Its Video Games Into Films and TV appeared first on /Film.
from /Film http://bit.ly/2QcEWWJ
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