Sony Gets Adaptation-Happy With Helldivers 2, Horizon Zero Dawn Movies
To the big screen!
Sony hasn’t been shy about its plans to bring game series to other mediums (think The Last of Us TV series and the Uncharted movie), and a recent announcement shows it has no plans of slowing down. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony revealed two more film adaptations and an anime series are in the works. While it’s impossible to say yet how any of them will turn out, the announcement does suggest that Sony wants to continue trying for another hit like The Last of Us — whether or not it’s something audiences actually want.
In its CES presentation, Sony confirmed that both Horizon Zero Dawn and Helldivers 2 have movies in development, while an anime series based on Ghost of Tsushima is also in development. The Ghost of Tsushima anime is set to air on streaming service Crunchyroll in 2027, inspired by both the game’s campaign and its more multiplayer Legends mode, with its more supernatural story. Neither the Horizon Zero Dawn or Helldivers 2 movies have announced release dates or casts.
Ghost of Tsushima’s anime adaptation is still years away.
These new announcements add to a wealth of adaptations Sony has previously announced to bring PlayStation games into other media. A series based on God of War is still being worked on, though its status is unknown. The Last of Us TV series is set to air its second season beginning in April and a film adaptation of Until Dawn is scheduled to premiere in theaters the same month. Even Horizon Zero Dawn previously had a TV series announced, though production on that show has since ceased.
Despite already canning one adaptation of Horizon Zero Dawn, Sony seems particularly set on getting audiences bought in to the series. Last year, the then-seven-year-old game got a remaster and the Lego Horizon Adventures spinoff, following a VR game the year before. Then there’s the live-service entry in the series that’s reportedly in development right now. At CES, Sony even took time to debut a music video made using assets from Lego Horizon Adventures.
Horizon Zero Dawn’s intriguing world could be enough of a motivation for Sony to pursue film adaptations.
The point is, Sony clearly wants to make Horizon into a flagship series, and it’s not hard to imagine why. Both games in the main series have been commercial and critical successes, along with being showcases of the PlayStation’s technical power, which helps give Sony a leg up in the neverending, mostly pointless battle to be the console with the shiniest graphics. The series’ collaboration with Lego might be equally telling of Sony’s motives. In addition to the Lego Horizon game, a number of actual Lego sets based on the series’ robot dinosaurs have been produced, which at least suggests that Sony is banking on the striking designs of Horizon’s machine-animal hybrids being eye-catching enough to sell the series to movie and TV viewers who haven’t played the games.
The much stranger announcement is the Helldivers 2 adaptation. The multiplayer shooter was a success no one expected last year, and Sony is wasting no timing in attempting the cash in on it. It has the kind of short-term logic one could easily expect from the entertainment industry but there’s one obvious issue with the idea — Starship Troopers. Helldivers 2 is already an obvious riff on that sci-fi film’s anti-fascist allegory, laying its satire on thick in everything from its tutorial to the most minute flavor text within the game.
Translating the Starship Troopers-inspired Helldivers 2 back into a movie could be a thankless, and possibly pointless, task.
But where Starship Troopers was grotesque and unflinching in its portrayal of the harms of a fascist government, it seems unlikely that the Helldivers 2 movie will do the same under the watchful eye of Sony. The adaptation will need to be palatable to mass audiences, which also means catering to portions of the game’s player base who are more into the hyper-violent fascist cosplay of Helldivers 2 rather than the cheeky anti-fascist overtones in between the action. As with many multiplayer live-service games, the story of Helldivers 2 isn’t about what the game directly tells players as much as it’s about what emerges in gameplay from interactions between people. Much of the game’s joy, and its satirical humor, comes from spontaneous interactions. Strip that away and you’ve just got the surface-level satire, which is all-too-likely to be sanded down further in the adaptation.
None of Sony’s announcements were necessarily surprising, given how hungry for video game adaptations it’s been lately. Given the success of Sony’s The Last of Us TV series, and other adaptations like the Nier Automata anime, there’s always the possibility that either of the recently announced films could exceed expectations. But it’s hard to shake the notion that they represent the company grasping at straws to repeat earlier successes with adaptations, no matter how unlikely the source material.
