In one of the weirdest decisions of all time, Sony is about to make a Gran Turismo movie with Stranger Things’ David Harbour in the proverbial driver’s seat. One element that makes video games notoriously tricky to adapt to film is the threadbare plots. At least when you’re attempting to adapt Super Mario or Gears of War, you have a slight narrative framework to erect a script on. With Gran Turismo, you basically just have cars and a racetrack.
The Stranger Things star has signed on to star in Gran Turismo, the Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions feature adaptation of the best-selling racing video game.
Neill Blomkamp, best known for his sci-fi movies such as District 9 and Elysium, is hitting where the rubber meets the road with this one, directing the project that has a script by Jason Hall (American Sniper) and Zach Baylin (King Richard).
Based on a true story, the project is described as the ultimate wish-fulfillment tale of a teenage Gran Turismo player whose gaming skills won him a series of Nissan competitions to become an actual professional racecar driver.
All that said, video game movies are close to decent nowadays. Before Detective Pikachu and the Sonic franchise, the words “video game movie” were synonymous with “sit this one out” for film fans. Like the superhero genre in the early 2000s, today’s video game movies are finally starting to get their act together—no pun intended. However, equally similar to the formative years of the superhero genre, for every two steps forward video games movies take, they also take ten backward.
Source by boingboing.net
