During a recent investor briefing, Sony announced several upcoming television projects. There’s a Horizon Zero Dawn show coming to Netflix, a God of War one for Amazon, and an as-yet-unplaced pitch for a Gran Turismo movie.
These all follow on the heels of last year’s Uncharted film, which I thought was a duffer but did well (over $400 million) at the box office, and join three more projects which were already known about. There’s going to be an HBO show based on The Last of Us, a Ghost of Tsushima movie, and—oddest of all—a Twisted Metal TV series that’s being made by NBC.
There’s an actual image of The Last of Us, and we know the main actors (Joel is Pedro Pascal, best-known for The Mandalorian, and Ellie is Bella Ramsey, who made for an excellent Mildred Hubble in The Worst Witch), so that one’s definitely going to happen.
Jennifer Lawrence for Aloy in #Horizon TV series ?#HorizonForbiddenWest #HorizonZeroDawn #HungerGames pic.twitter.com/6ZOt3aqsH7May 26, 2022
As for the others, Hollywood news site Deadline is reporting that Sony’s eyeing up none other than District 9’s Neill Blomkamp to direct the proposed Gran Turismo movie. Director and writer Takashi Doscher is on scripting duties for Ghost of Tsushima, while the Twisted Metal show has a cast and and a script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.
There’s no detail whatsoever on the Horizon Zero Dawn series, though of course plenty of internet opinion about who should be cast as protagonist Aloy. Jennifer Lawrence isn’t a bad shout actually, at least we know she can shoot a bow.
SIE boss Jim Ryan was bullish at the presentation where this slate of projects will be announced, and it’s clear that PlayStation is both going all-in on screen projects and spreading them evenly across the major streaming services. As well as the non-interactive stuff, PlayStation’s also promising “a whole slate” (opens in new tab) of games getting ported over to PC in future—and expects to earn a staggering $300 million (opens in new tab) from PC game sales over the next year, just under four times what it made last year. All of this and we still can’t get a Bloodborne port, eh.