Sony’s ‘Until Dawn’ Movie Looks Nothing Like The Video Game

Imagine you were in charge of making a video game movie adaptation. Let’s say you were going to remake The Last Of Us. But instead of having Joel and Ellie, you picked totally new characters. And instead of having the movie set in a fungus-based zombie apocalypse, you decided to feature a climate apocalypse. Everything that made the game what it was was now different, and the outcome was just a generic-looking disaster movie.

That’s pretty much the vibe I’m getting from the “First Look” at Sony’s Until Dawn adaptation, based on one of my favorite horror video games. There are still teens, just different teens, and they still show up to a mysterious house, only it’s not set in the winter and looks completely different and far less menacing. There are no wendigos as far as I can tell. Had you only seen the below footage without the words Until Dawn, I suspect you would not know it was an adaptation of that video game at all.

Here’s the video:

One saving grace here is the casting of Peter Stormare—aka Black Ops 6’s “The Replacer”—but even Stormare (who was the voice of Dr. Hill in the game) can’t make this exciting.

As a horror movie, separate from the game, it’s a cool enough concept. The film’s description is, at the very least, somewhat interesting. In some ways, it actually sounds more like a game than a movie. Basically, each night the characters are killed by some new terrifying threat—in what sounds like a film that will bounce around various horror movie genres—and each new day they are brought back to life to try again. Here’s the synopsis:

“One year after her sister Melanie mysteriously disappeared, Clover and her friends head into the remote valley where she vanished in search of answers. Exploring an abandoned visitor center, they find themselves stalked by a masked killer and horrifically murdered one by one…only to wake up and find themselves back at the beginning of the same evening. Trapped in the valley, they’re forced to relive the nightmare again and again - only each time the killer threat is different, each more terrifying than the last. Hope dwindling, the group soon realizes they have a limited number of deaths left, and the only way to escape is to survive until dawn.”

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It’s basically Groundhog Day with teens and a horror twist.

(Notice how much spookier and dangerous the Washington Lodge looks in the game than the house in the image at the top of this post).

The weirdest thing about all of this, however, is the fact that Until Dawn is being adapted into a movie in the first place. It’s absurd the same way an Uncharted movie is absurd. Uncharted was basically Naughty Dog’s attempt to capture the swashbuckling adventures of Indiana Jones in a video game (Harrison Ford even did a commercial for Uncharted 3). Adapting those games into a movie is pointless, since you already have the Indiana Jones films.

Until Dawn is an interactive storytelling experience designed to make players feel like they’re in a horror movie. That’s the entire point of the game! Turning a game that’s designed to feel like being in a horror movie into a horror movie pretty much defeats the point! It even had recognizable stars like Rami Malek in it, which just heightened the sense that this was a movie-game. It’s even sillier than an Uncharted adaptation. It’s like saying “We’re going to adapt this chess video game into a board game!” I suppose that’s the point of making these big changes to the game’s story, but if you’re going to make such big changes that also defeats the point of an adaptation.

Oh well. Hopefully it’s good, but I have some grave doubts.

Sony recently announced a whole lineup of game-to-movie adaptations which you can read about here. The new trailer for The Last Of Us Season 2 is also out and worth a watch.

What do you make of this Until Dawn adaptation first-look? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.