In a story published exclusively today by The Hollywood Reporter, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has now established a PlayStation Productions studio that will be dedicated to the adaptation of the company's vast catalog of videogame intellectual properties for cinema and television.
The studio, located at Sony Pictures in Culver City, California, is headed by Asad Qizilbash (former marketing manager at Sony) and overseen by SIE Worldwide Studios Chairman Shawn Layden.
Qizilbash told THW:
For the last year and a half, two years, we’ve spent time trying to understand the industry, talking to writers, directors, producers. We talked to Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Kevin Feige to really get an understanding of the industry. Instead of licensing our IP out to studios, we felt the better approach was for us to develop and produce for ourselves. One, because we’re more familiar, but also because we know what the PlayStation community loves.
We created this entity to manage and control the process of getting the right director, the right actors, the right screenwriter. Ultimately, the story will determine the format. We want to bring our IP to the medium that best honors the property.
Marvel once again pops up in the words of Shawn Layden as an example to follow, albeit a lofty one for sure.
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.
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.
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
There's apparently already an initial 'slate' of projects underway at PlayStation Productions, though it is unclear how far these are from release. We may learn more during this year's San Diego Comic-Con, which is usually a big fair for cinema and TV.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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