Sony’s live-action movie adaptation of developer Supermassive’s acclaimed PS4 cinematic horror game Until Dawn is set to hit the big screen on 25th April next year.
An Until Dawn movie was officially announced back in January, with Shazam and Lights Out director David F. Sandberg helming the production based on a script by Blair Butler and It, Annabelle, and The Nun scribe Gary Dauberman. It stars Ella Rubin (The Idea of You), Michael Cimino (Love Victor), Ji-young Yoo (Expats), Odessa A’zion (Hellraiser), Maia Mitchell, and Peter Stormare – who’ll be reprising his role as psychiatrist Dr Hill from the game.
An Until Dawn movie has, admittedly, bit of a strange proposition from the start, given the whole point of Supermassive’s original game (which released for PS4 back in 2015) was to let players live out their own trope-y teen slasher movie, navigating a whole bunch of classic genre conventions to see who lives and dies based on their choices. So an Until Dawn movie shorn of the interactive bits would largely just be a slightly naff slasher film.
Still, Sony’s big screen adaptation – previously described as a “R-rated love letter to the horror genre” – was confirmed to have wrapped filming earlier this month, and now Deadline reports it’s set to hit cinemas on 25th April next year.
It arrives in the wake of Sony’s recent Until Dawn remake for PC and PS5, which gave the original a striking makeover, but – as Digital Foundry’s Will Judd recently explained – released on a “shaky technical footing”. But despite its slightly mixed reception, Sony seemingly has big plans for the franchise given hints of a sequel in addition to the imminent movie version.
Until Dawn joins an increasingly long line-up of PlayStation games that’ve received the adaptation treatment for film or TV in recent years, with varying degrees of success. Sony’s Uncharted and Gran Turismo movies didn’t exactly dazzle when they launched in 2022 and 2023 respectively, but last year’s nine-episode HBO adaptation of The Last of Us was a huge critical and commercial hit, with a second season on the way. Still to come are big screen adaptations of Ghost of Tsushima, Jack and Daxter, Days Gone, and Gravity Rush, with a TV adaptation of God of War also confirmed.