Sony sets up PlayStation Productions to develop new films and TV shows

Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced the launch of PlayStation Productions. The division will develop and produce new film and TV projects based on the company’s wide range of video games. That is more than 100 original properties such as Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Metal Gear Solid, Uncharted, God of War, The Last of Us, and Ratchet & Clank.

It is being led by Asad Qizilbash, from Sony’s PlayStation marketing group, and overseen by Shawn Layden, chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios. The new production company will develop and produce projects internally.

“We’ve got 25 years of game development experience and that’s created 25 years of great games, franchises and stories,” Layden told The Hollywood Reporter. “We feel that now is a good time to look at other media opportunities across streaming or film or television to give our worlds life in another spectrum.”

“We looked at what Marvel has done in taking the world of comic books and making it into the biggest thing in the film world. It would be a lofty goal to say we’re following in their footsteps, but certainly we’re taking inspiration from that.”

“Instead of licensing our IP out to studios, we felt the better approach was for us to develop and produce for ourselves,” said Qizilbash. “One, because we’re more familiar, but also because we know what the PlayStation community loves.”

“You can see just by watching older video game adaptations that the screenwriter or director didn’t understand that world or the gaming thing,” Layden says. “The real challenge is, how do you take 80 hours of gameplay and make it into a movie? The answer is, you don’t. What you do is you take that ethos you write from there specifically for the film audience. You don’t try to retell the game in a movie.”

“We created this entity to manage and control the process of getting the right director, the right actors, the right screenwriter,” says Qizilbash.

“This is a passion project for me,” says Layden. “To be the first gaming entity to do something lasting and meaningful in a completely different medium is something I’d like to see us achieve here at PlayStation Productions.”