Sony is continuing to go all in on turning its flagship video games into TV shows and movies — according to Variety, the company announced that it’s making a show based on Horizon Zero Dawn with Netflix at an event for investors. Sony is also working on a movie based on the Gran Turismo series, according to Deadline, but hasn’t found a distributor for it yet, and could feature Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Chappie) as its director. (I’m very curious as to what the plan for this series is — Variety just says it’ll be about “racing.”)
Both projects are reported to be in “early development,” so we likely won’t be streaming them for quite a while. However, the fact that Sony’s continuing to introduce new TV and movie projects shows that the company is pretty committed to expanding the PlayStation brand beyond just hardware and video games.
PlayStation Productions currently has several other projects in the works (10 in total, according to Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra). It’s reportedly working on:
That is a lot of big franchises, and some of the projects have some heavy hitters attached. Oscar Isaac will be playing Solid Snake, Pedro Pascal will act as Joel, Bella Ramsey will play Ellie, and Ghost of Tsushima is being directed by one of the people behind the John Wick movies. And, of course, the recently released Uncharted movie starred Hollywood’s golden boy, Tom Holland. PlayStation Productions isn’t dipping its toe in the cinematic waters; it’s diving in headfirst.
This news also shows that Sony’s continuing its strategy of working with different streaming companies — it seems like no matter what you subscribe to, the company wants to make sure you’ll be able to watch at least something starting its video game characters (or, like, cars in the case of Gran Turismo). During its investor briefing, Sony said that the “highly competitive streaming wars” are good for the company.
This isn’t the only move the company’s making to expand the PlayStation brand beyond the audience of just people who buy consoles. On Wednesday, the company announced that it wants to significantly expand its games’ presence on PC and mobile as well.
Update May 26th, 6:15PM ET: Updated to reflect Deadline’s story that the Gran Turismo project is a movie instead of a TV show.
wazup.