Sony's live-action film adaptation of developer Supermassive's acclaimed PS4 cinematic horror game Until Dawn will hit the big screen on April 25 next year.
An Until Dawn movie was officially announced in January, with Shazam and Lights Out director David F. Sandberg directing the production based on a script by Blair Butler and It, Annabelle and The Nun writer 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 will reprise his role as a psychiatrist. Dr. Hill from the game.
Admittedly, an Until Dawn movie is a bit of a strange proposition from the start, given that the goal of Supermassive's original game (which launched on PS4 in 2015) was to allow players to live out their own teen horror movie trope, browsing. plenty of classic genre conventions to see who lives and dies based on your choices. So an Until Dawn movie without interactive parts would largely be a slightly unpleasant horror movie.
Still, Sony's big-screen adaptation, previously described as an “R-rated love letter to the horror genre,” was confirmed to have wrapped filming earlier this month, and now Deadline reports it's coming to theaters on April 25 of next year.
It arrives in the wake of Sony's recent Until Dawn remake for PC and PS5, which gave the original a stunning makeover but, as Digital Foundry's Will Judd recently explained, launched on a “shaky technical foundation.” But despite its slightly mixed reception, Sony apparently has big plans for the franchise given signs of a sequel in addition to the impending film version.
Until Dawn joins a growing list of PlayStation games that have received the film or television adaptation treatment in recent years, with varying degrees of success. Sony's Uncharted and Gran Turismo movies didn't exactly dazzle when they were released in 2022 and 2023 respectively, but HBO's nine-episode adaptation of last year's The Last of Us was a huge critical and commercial success, with a second season in path. Big screen adaptations of Ghost of Tsushima, Jack and Daxter, Days Gone and Gravity Rush are still to come, and a TV adaptation of God of War has also been confirmed.