Until Dawn movie in the works even though it already came out almost 9 years ago
This one should be easy to crack, right?
Shazam! director David F. Sandberg is returning to his horror roots with an adaptation of PlayStation's 2015 horror hit Until Dawn. The problem? The original game already was an interactive movie.
The Hollywood Reporter shared the latest exclusive on PlayStation Productions' ever-growing output of movie and TV adaptations yesterday, January 17, adding that Screen Gems would co-produce the project alongside Sony.
On top of David F. Sandberg (who's spent the last few years stuck far away in DC land), Gary Dauberman, the screenwriter behind recent horror hits like It, Annabelle, and The Nun, is doing extra work on a script which was originally written, unbeknownst to almost everyone, by The Invitation's Blair Butler.
For Sandberg, Until Dawn represents a return to horror after two Shazam! movies, the last of which flopped terribly at the box office last year like everything DC put out during the late DCEU's final stretch. Meanwhile, Dauberman has become one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood. Two highlights on his list of upcoming projects are an adaptation of Stephen King's Salem's Lot (which seems to be going straight to Max) and the Disney+ live-action Gargoyles series.
To gamers, however, this new movie from PlayStation Productions may probably sound like the dumbest f**king thing they could come up with when looking at their vast library of video game hits to adapt. A lot people already had their doubts about HBO's The Last of Us straight-up retelling a story that was already presented in a cinematic way, but after all, it was a game that behaved like a game and didn't use the same audiovisual language most of the time. When it comes to works such as Until Dawn, however, the original experience already resembles that of a movie as much as it can. When you inevitably take out the "make-your-own-story" element when jumping to another medium out of an otherwise simple slasher feature, what's left to be impressed by?
Up next coming from the video game adaptations pipeline, we've got Halo season 2 (Paramount+) and Fallout's premiere season (Prime Video). So far, TV seems to be working out better for these than cinema, so here's hoping for more wins in that space.