Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced the establishment of PlayStation Productions, a brand new wing that will focus on adapting and taking inspiration from the company’s huge collection of video games to create content for TV and Film.
PlayStation Productions, based in Culver City, will be headed by Asad Qizilbash and overseen by SIE Worldwide Studios Chairman Shawn Layden. Qizilbash was previously the Vice President, Marketing Exclusive Games & World Wide Studios IP Expansion but now will head the the production studio.
Layden and Qizilbash spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, explaining their plans and ambitions.
Layden:
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.
Qizilbash
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.
For the last year and half, two years, we’ve spent time trying to understand the industry, talking to writers, directors, producers,
We talked to [film producer] Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Kevin Feige to really get an understanding of the industry.
PlayStation Productions will be helped by Sony Studios, Sony’s main TV and Film production team but only in the distribution to utilize its existing channels. The production of all PlayStation Productions content will be handled by themselves giving them full autonomy.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see what PlayStation Productions can come up with, who knows we might just be witnessing the birth of the next stage of Cinema and TV like we saw with Marvel Studios years back.
Thoughts on the news? What PlayStation IP would you like to be adapted to the big or small screen? Let us know below.
