Sony Pictures Eyes Director Neill Blomkamp to Steer Gran Turismo Movie

Sony is just really disappointing me with the focus on turning games into movies.

Racing sportsmanship the Motion picture!!

Very interesting directorial decision. Blomkamp excels at heavily utilizing cgi in his films. I’d hope for a more practical approach to a car film, however Blomkamp is driven to innovate so I’m curious to see how this turns out!

I'm excited, this is a franchise I would love to see on the movie scene

Could not think of a Sony IP I'd want to see any less than GT on the screen. I like a good car chase, but what even is a GT movie? Some Joe Blow buying a sedan and then moving up the ranks with sweeping shots of bumpers and a lingering muffler?

I guess having said that it could be a great comedy!

@Jimmer-jammer the games are cgi, makes sense to just stick with the same style for the movie.

@AdamNovice I think it's another communication thing. Sony's going in all these different directions with their video game franchises (e.g. live service, Game Pass style subscription, PC, mobile, movies, TV) but for the traditional PS people know and love the future is very unclear (all we have to go by currently is rumours and a South Korea rating for GoW Ragnarok).

After the flop that is Need for Speed the movie, I kinda lost interest in seeing any other racing game turned into a movie

Is this going to have Feeder and Daiki Kasho in the soundtrack?

Can imagine some storyline that traverses Trial Mountain, and Deep Forest,

to Tokyo R246, Special Stage 12 to the dusk of Seattle.

All in a brand new car with a CD player.

I will definitely wake up at 12 in my clothes after a night of gin after a night out late all by myself.

Break it down again I'm suffering my heads out of sync but I can't hide the pain.

Is this the ending or is this the start of something big for GT?

All that we sether or all that we are communication connected apart we got a great GT community that has been built up over the years.

After spending seven days in the sun with a friend named laura in southern Spain to see the ocean wave's blue, way back in may.
I realised my love for my car. She's my heaven, she's has sparks flying around the bends.

Unfortunately I had to sell it for credit to go buy more Gran Tuirsmo cars.

Now that she's not around and I'm no longer in spain, how do you feel when there is no sun and when rain clouds come?
You buy an AE86 from the used car dealership and go organise a race late at night with rain flooding the circuit as you feel the moment and turn to face what you've become.

Everything you do as you play GT from your bedroom on Playstation.

That is all.

Can't help myself it's just the way I'm feeling.

@Milktastrophe Perhaps. Though, at least for me, I’d much rather see real cars and stuntmen pushing the limits of physics in a film.

It's fine to do whatever they plan on doing to create either a movie or a TV series, but do we really need both? What can they possibly do in both of them to create an actual need for both?

Could quite easily create a story based around Igor Fraga turning his esim career into a professional driving career from playing the GT games. Just one example of how a story could be made based on the GT franchise.

Personally, i would quite happily watch 2 hours of some of the best cars being driven through stunning landscapes and seeing beautiful cinematography of cars driving around mountains etc. I think there would be a real interest in that type of film being watched (maybe not a movie) by auto fans.

We'll probably end up with Ninja and YoLandi driving around in a Dacia acting "gangsta"

Niell Blomkamp? Screw that! Get Niel Breen!

Will probably be a rags to riches plot, all from playing gt7.

Trailer narrator: "This summer... He'll go through hell to nail those licenses."

So Sony wants to compete with the Fast and the Furious franchise I hope they succeed.

@MisterXpoSay Initial D is a better benchmark for Sony.

Even though I like the game I feel movies about cars are soooo boring...

I’d be happy with some kind of Gran Turismo, gone in 60 seconds type mash up

@gr8zky i'd quite enjoy a gran turismo/talladega nights mash up..john c in the lead role...👍

Films, mobile gaming and live service games.

Shall I sell my PS5 now or what? Not a single big single player story game, which Sony has done so well at, announced after GoW. Seriously getting concerned about the direction of travel.

The plot: man walks into the Gran Turismo cafe and gets given menu to complete. Eventually one menu is to assassinate a world leader. Chaos ensues

@itsfoz We've got Spider-Man 2 in 2023 and Wolverine at some point but that's all we currently know. We really need a State of Play for announcements SOON because almost everything first announced with the PS5 in 2020 is out at this point aside from Stray, God of War Ragnarok, FF16 and Forspoken and we have no idea what the future is like. They've got all their studios working on multiple projects let's see what some of them are getting up to because I want to know what to look forward after these games I just want next gen exclusives.

Lol. This has all the makings of another terrible gaming movie. It’s a stretch at best. I love Gran Turismo and think this is a terrible idea

@itsfoz amen. The future is not bright.

How do they make a Gran Turismo movie?

This can't be good.

@MattBoothDev I imagine it's going to be like a live action Pixar's Cars.

I don't care what anyone else says, that's what it needs to be.

I kinda wished Neill Blomkamp was going to direct the Horizon Zero Dawn Netflix series project. Seems a better fit with Blomkamp's experience with CGI creatures and robots and whatnot.
Curious to see what they will do with the Gran Turismo IP.

This movie is going to revolutionize movies.

In this 97 minute movie, you’ll have immediate access to the first 30 minutes when you buy your ticket.

Then you’ll have a tiny window to pay for the next 15 minutes, but the catch is, just when you go to pay, the ticket price will “re-balance” itself and you’ll be forced to pay full price again.

This will repeat until you get to the last 7 minutes of the movie. At this point, the producer will come out, apologize and give you the last 7 minutes for free. Everyone will up their Rotten Tomatoes rating by 10 as a result.

This movie is going to rule.

Pretty funny how PlayStations messaging is sounding more and more like those first initial years of Xbox one. I remember the joke of ‘tv tv tv’.

I can’t see how a successful gran turismo movie could be done…all I can imagine is something similar to that classic Need for speed movie we all went out to watch.
I can just hope they make something bombastic and stupid like the fast and furious franchise but have a very serious 10 minute intro about the history of cars. And have no dialogue, only subtitles.

A tv show though…if they move away from any sort of drama and have it more akin to Top gear…I could see that working.

@BusyOlf a huge GT fan here and I was like why a GT movie that's so stupid before reading your comment. There is something very uplifting seeing someone go from video game sim racer to a real life racer and we all like a success story. Youtubers like SuperGT and Jimmy Broadbent are doing things similar

@Octane that's the only way this will work. You've convinced me.

A car movie doesn't seem to fit Blomkamp's style, but I'm curious. If the tone is more serious, without cringe characters trying to crack jokes every minute, with great practical effects, more like Top Gun (planes, I know) than Fast and Furious, I think it could be good.

@RudeAnimat0r 100% this. It’s an entirely plot free car driving game.

@Octane I was just about to chime in with "Or they could go the anthropomorphized car route!" XD

It's going to be about Luca from the Cafe Menu's. After retiring from racing he opened the Cafe. Then they kidnapped his grand daughter. He gets pulled back in for one... last... race. This time it's personal.

If this is not Days of Thunder 2, this does not need to exist. We have Top Gun 2. Prove me wrong.

@Bleachedsmiles X1 launch had Speilberg and Lucas on stage telling us the future of film and television is interactive games. PS5 has Jim telling us the future of games is non-interactive live action film and TV. So this is.....worse? I'm looking forward to the next Naughty Dog game feat. appearances by Kanye West, Usher, Megan Thee Stallion, Geoff Keighley Ryan Seacrest, and more!

@themightyant Although more than half of all consoles in the 90's were Game Boys, so the comparison of then vs. now isn't necessarily a comparison of similar markets. It could also be said that most of the 90's "consoles" were more analogous to the function of mobile gaming today and not really comparable to console sales, and console has grown tremendously since then.

@Octane Chris Pratt as the voice of Porche 911?

@Nepp67 Skipped the PS4 years, then?

@themightyant Yeah, I've definitely heard, especially Layden say that (though Jim has contradicted him, and Phil's chasing the "2 billion gamers") but I still find the numbers to be a puzzling proposition. World population has more than doubled since then, gaming has become mainstream even if just to play FIFA, and as you're so keen to point out in the other thread , old people game vs games being toys for children back then. And in that time, the same number of people buy consoles, meaning the portion of the population buying them roughly halved? I'm not buying that. The industry ballooned into a mega profitable field run by mega conglomerates compared to garage studios and small businesses back then based only on increased spend by the same market depth? There's something funny about how those numbers are being used.

And yeah, they're all chasing that mobile market that's not in consoles. But I have to wonder how people that have found no reason to buy a console in the last 35 years will suddenly be inspired to buy one after watching a B-movie that happens to be loosely based on a video game franchise. Nintendo tried to convert non-gamers into gamers with the Wii and all they did was create mobile gaming. And that was a more direct attempt than these films.

I mean, they could be aiming at the young demographic, say, teens and tweens, that were unaware of the console space before.....

@themightyant TBH "becoming niche again" is what I think most of us on sites like this would want to happen, but the reality doesn't appear to move that way.

But, yeah, if 35 years of consoles, access to mobile games and arcades, etc. didn't convince someone to buy a console before now, watching a GT movie isn't going to do it. I get them trying to unlock market, but I think more than anything it shows they don't really even have a clue how they might do that. The best try was Wii, and that failed mightily. PS4/X1 tried to make games the future of movies by making games into interactive movies. That kinda worked but with limited results. But now they're just going off the rails. $70 games certainly won't grow market, it'll shrink it. That's just squeezing blood from the stone if we go with the "console sales are static" narrative. Eventually that backfires.

All that said, the numbers you listed kind of prove the point though. That's solid growth each generation, not static numbers. Smoothed over, it's about 50m more each gen, not "around 180 each generation." Moderate, steady growth. Not "about the same" as Layden and others have said.

Last gen was definitely an outlier where it shrank, but that was practically a single console generation. (And a few other factors, like Nintendo not really being included at all since their primary system was the 3DS at the time which isn't listed with home consoles but for that one time period really was the main console from Nintedno. Heck, even as an enthusiast my 3DS's got used 3x more than my PS4 just due to the library, not due to being handheld, Xbox basically being off the market for years, and the artificial boost to sales in prior generations (PS1 for CD players, PS2 for DVD players, PS3 for BD - Wii for streaming - 360 for RROD repurchases) indicates solid, steady, growth in console gaming, for actual game players, not static numbers. It just isn't growing as fast as they want it to grow.

This gen, Switch was at 103M as of January, and that was before Pokemon Arceus affected sales much with massive games dropping just this year. PS5+XSXS we don't have hard numbers but it's estimated as around 35M between the two. So we're up to at least around 140M for the gen before even satisfying launch demand. I think that's a good start to more growth. And more growth for people buying hardware only to play games rather than the many people that bought older hardware to use as media players.

The one thing that might keep numbers suppressed this gen, though is the rise of streaming (Game Pass, Luna, etc,) If they significantly grow by removing the $500 brick as a barrier to entry to playing console games with a controller and TV (or handheld setup), that mostly counts as "console market" for software publishing purposes (which is what the movies are trying to grow.) Valhalla on a PS5 and Valhalla on Luna is still Valhalla being played on a screen, etc. I didn't include Plus Premium in that list because of the bewildering decision to not stream current-gen games and only retro games. It's a leap back from PSNow in that regard. That really shoots it out of the competition for that streamed-console space, though it has one foot in that market.

@themightyant
+~47M
+~72M
-~91M
+/-??

The trend was up until that drop. It gets weird though because Switch is half in that gen, half in this gen, and XB was basically missing for half the gen, so it's not necessarily possible to divide it evenly after that. 3DS was Nintendo's "only" console during the WiiU years but isn't counted.

And again, we're also assuming that 200M consoles sold in 2002 means the same as 200M consoles sold in 2022, which we're not taking into account how many consoles were bought back then as media players while virtually none are now. I.E. if half the players bought a PS2 (just making up a number) as a cheap DVD player, for game publishing purposes, the numbers were half what they looked like back then. So the numbers really don't tell a concise story.

BUT, if we DO give this all the benefit of the doubt and say it's really true. Then we have a few other conundrums. What is this new "more mainstream" more "casual" audience we keep hearing about and games keep chasing if the market for consoles is actually the same, and, as a percentage of total population, shrinking dramatically over time?! Does that mean there's actually far, far less gaming hobbyists than there used to be and the bulk of console owners are actually playing fewer games for less time? And how has nobody addressed such a massive contraction of a key market segment, if not primary market segment in the industry? And if so, how are more and more and more devs and games surviving the market? We're all buying more, yes, but people like us are at the extreme end of buying and we don't even come close to keeping up with it all. And we're way, way, way outside the average.

There's a whole lot of conflicting information there. "Console sales are stagnant" yet "theres this large new market to tap much more mainstream than niche gamers" is contradictory. Software sales grow, yet games ore more focused on locking people into a single title as much as possible. I'd say we're missing something, but I get the sense that they're missing something. Otherwise answers to these questions would have been answered by them before we even asked them for the sake of investors.

There's absolutely missing links to all this.

Yeah, Netflix could have done it....I don't think they have cash to really do it is the issue. MS obviously is making progress. Google blew it, but they'll be back. Amazon....they're going slow and steady...but haven't really committed in full yet. Not sure where that's going. There's the Apple rumors. We'll see how that goes but they could really push something. Though I'm not sure I like that thought. Tencent....I like that thought even less but some signs are there. At least it's not Zuck?

Always a pleasure! : )