Sony Interactive Launches New Unit To Adapt Games Into Films, TV Shows
Aidan O'Brien
In a recent report, Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Sony Interactive has established a new unit to turn their games into films and TV shows. PlayStation Productions will be managed by Asad QizilbAH and overseen by SIE chairman of Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden. The unit is already hard at work on its first group of productions and will be based at the Sony Studios lot at Culver City.
Sony is sitting on quite the catalogue of intellectual property and seems to feel that now is the right time to move into the business of turning those games into TV shows and movies. Rather than licensing out the properties to other studios for adaptations, Sony will be handling everything themselves and utilizing their own Sony Studios to help with distribution. According to the report, it is very important to Sony that people who are knowledgeable and passionate about the projects should be the people who are working on them.
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 80 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.
One very important that might be playing into Sony’s decision to move forward with this plan is that streaming services are becoming the ubiquitous method by which people engage with television and film in the home. The old days of needed to pull people into a weekly time slot are no longer so strict. If you can put your series on Amazon Prime, Hulu, or Netflix, and have people engage with them when they want, it can often mean great success for a show that might have failed under the old TV model.
While Sony hasn’t said anything about the details of their distribution models, it’s almost impossible to imagine a world where their new TV content, at least, is not being streamed somewhere. There are no details yet about what the first projects from PlayStation Productions might be, but we will be keeping a close eye on the rumor mill.
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