PlayStation Productions has access to a vast wealth of popular IP that’d make great movies and TV shows. We’ve already gotten the award-winning The Last of Us, Uncharted was a swashbuckling blockbuster romp, and Twisted Metal is absolutely a TV show.
But eyebrows were rightly raised when Sony unveiled Gran Turismo. The venerable franchise is one of its best-selling series, but is still a dry car racing simulator with no real characters, no plot, and a focus on making sure engine noises and car interiors are captured with scarily perfect attention to detail.
Understandably, director Neill Blomkamp has admitted he had the same confused reaction when speaking to TheWrap.
“I was going to go and do another film. And then Sony said like, ‘Whoa, whoa, before you go, we want to make Gran Turismo into a movie. Do you want to look at this?”
His answer:
“There’s no way that you can make a movie out of Gran Turismo. It doesn’t make any sense.”
After Blomkamp read the script (and presumably also took into account the large amount of money he’d be paid) he agreed that this would indeed be an artistically fulfilling creative pursuit:
“I was struck by this notion of treating a video game film like the way that The Social Network dealt with Facebook in that you’re not inside the lore of the game, you’re external from it. I thought that was a really interesting way to make a video game film. And then also that it was biographical to Jann Mardenborough, so it had this biopic element, which is a different kind of filmmaking than I had done before.”
The fact that Gran Turismo is based on a true story is something Sony clearly wants audiences to be aware of. The movie has already released in several international markets under the title Gran Turismo, though its wide domestic release has seen a slight alteration to Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story.
Reviews are broadly positive, with many underlining that it’s only theoretically a video game movie, and is instead (as Blomkamp intended) more of a biopic of Jann Mardenborough. Either way, domestic audiences can now find out for themselves, as Gran Turismo is in wide release.