Maybe PlayStation Productions can finally make a critically-acclaimed film.
What you need to know
- Sony just launched the PlayStation Productions division.
- PlayStation Productions aims to develop films and TV shows from the company’s game catalog.
- The team wants to control the entire process to ensure quality.
- A number of projects are already in the works.
PlayStation has some excellent franchises under its belt like God of War and Uncharted. According to an article by the Hollywood Reporter, Sony has launched a division called “PlayStation Productions.” Asad Qizilbash will lead it, but it’ll be overseen by Shawn Layden. The outlet said PlayStation Productions “will develop and produce projects based on the company’s catalog of more than a hundred games.”
PlayStation Productions is already working on its first couple of projects. This will probably be exciting news for the millions of fans who enjoy the company’s titles. Layden said the following when asked about the venture.
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… You can see just by watching older video game adaptations that the screenwriter or director didn’t understand that world or the gaming thing. The real challenge is, how do you take eighty hours of gameplay and make it into a movie? The answer is, 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.
Qizilbash added that the division didn’t want to license its content because it couldn’t monitor quality. He said the following to the Hollywood Reporter.
Instead of licensing… out to studios, we felt the better approach was for us to develop and produce for ourselves… because we’re more familiar, but also because we know what the PlayStation community loves… For the last year and half, two years, we’ve spent time trying to understand the industry, talking to writers, directors, producers. We talked to… Kevin Feige to really get an understanding of the industry. We looked at what Marvel has done in taking the world of comic books and making it into the biggest thing in the film world. It would be a lofty goal to say we’re following in their footsteps, but certainly we’re taking inspiration from that… We created this entity to manage and control the process of getting the right director, the right actors, the right screenwriter.
In the past, video game adaptations like Assassin’s Creed, Tomb Raider, and Warcraft haven’t received accolades for the stories they tell. It’s not because they’re trying to capture the essence of gameplay, but because they failed on a storytelling front. If PlayStation Productions manages to tell compelling stories, their projects should be successful.
What games would you like to see get adapted? Do you think PlayStation Productions is a good idea? Let us know in the comments below.
