Sony Making Helldivers 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn Movies

Movies

A couple of more recent games are joining classics like Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros. in making the leap to the big screen. Yesterday, Asad Qizilbash, the head of Sony Productions, announced that Sony was developing movie adaptations of Helldivers 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn. Both are in the very early stages of development and have no creative teams or production and release windows. Helldivers 2 is a third-person shooter that puts gamers in the boots of elite armored soldiers who complete a variety of missions while battling hordes of alien bugs or robots on a futuristic Earth. Horizon Zero Dawn is a sci-fi action RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world where players control a tribal hunter named Aloy as she battles giant robots on a quest to learn about her mysterious past. Sony has adapted several of its big video game franchises in recent years, such as the movies Uncharted and Gran Turismo and the HBO series The Last of Us. God of War is set to become an Amazon series run by Ronald D. Moore, the man behind the Battlestar Galactica remake/reboot.

Insert “I saw this movie when it was called Starship Troopers” joke here. Seriously, though, I’m not surprised that a big name in the video game industry like Sony wants to take advantage of what they probably see as a growing trend and get a bunch of movies and TV shows based on their games off the ground. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was a massive hit, and the Sonic the Hedgehog film franchise is three movies in now, with Sonic the Hedgehog 3 beating Disney’s big end-of-the-year release, Mufasa: The Lion King, despite being on fewer screens. With the once lucrative superhero genre on the wane, Hollywood wants the next fad to get here sooner rather than later, and video game adaptations look like they may be it. And they’re picking games that could conceivably make some interesting movies or shows; God of War is very cinematic, Uncharted is essentially a modern Indiana Jones (although by all accounts, the movie didn’t live up to the excellent games), and The Last of Us is about a zombie apocalypse, which has proven popular on screen in the past. I had major doubts about Gran Turismo, but the movie wasn’t half bad. Helldivers 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn have lots of potential to be entertaining adaptations.

Their success will rest on the execution, of course. Regardless of what you may have thought of them, The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Sonic the Hedgehog endeavored to keep the spirit of the video games that spawned them, with Mario Bros. including loads of references to the games and their surrounding media over the years. (My favorite was the commercial that used the theme song from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show.) Helldivers 2 – which will presumably just be called Helldivers – has a lot of breathing room; they can come up with all kinds of missions to send a team of Helldivers on, maybe splitting them up between the different enemies you face in the game to keep things fresh. Horizon Zero Dawn will probably have to be a stricter adaptation since Aloy has a very particular storyline she’s following; if they stick to that and get decent enough writers and actors, they should be able to keep fans of the game happy. And that’s the secret, which is hopefully what those adapting games have learned: don’t try to change or overcomplicate things. Just stick to the games as closely as possible, and fans will show up. The Last of Us seems to have gotten mixed reviews from gamers, with some enjoying it and others thinking it’s too different from its source material, which suggests Sony could go either way on these two.

Let us know what you think of Sony producing Helldivers 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn movies in the comments!

***

If you want to know what kind of political leanings movies have or just talk about cinema, check out the movie ratings community Criticless.

Get Your Geeks + Gamers merch here!