The previously announced Horizon Zero Dawn TV show adaptation that was being led by the same showrunner behind Netflix’s Umbrella Academy is no more, and Guerrilla’s open-world robot-dinosaur hunting series will be adapted into a movie instead.
At the top of the year, during CES 2025, Sony announced that it would be making a movie adaptation of Horizon Zero Dawn. An exciting announcement that fans presumed would be something to go along with the TV show we already knew was in development.
That’s not the case; however, PlayStation Productions head Asad Qizilbash confirmed this in an interview with Variety. Speaking to Variety ahead of the upcoming BAFTA 2025 Game Awards set for April 8, 2025, Qizilbash shared his thoughts on how prestige adaptations of video game series and franchises have gone so far, and how they could grow in the future.
During that discussion, Qizilbash talked about how these adaptations can be very successful, so long as the approach is right.
“I think what people have seen in Hollywood is that video game adaptations, if done right, can actually be very popular, and they scale really well. That’s been a big sea change that I’ve seen in the last five, six years, since we’ve really started to come and deliver some great content.“
Having that methodology is why Qizilbash admits that they felt a change needed to be made with how the Horizon Zero Dawn adaptation was developing. Qizilbash says that the TV show version that PlayStation Productions was working on with Netflix “just wasn’t creatively going how we wanted to,” prompting the switch to make it a movie instead—and likely a very different project altogether, beyond the obvious differences between making a movie and making a TV show.
Out of the adaptations we’ve seen from PlayStation Productions so far, it’s clear that HBO’s The Last of Us has been the most successful. The Twisted Metal show is set to premiere its second season sometime this summer, giving it another chance to make a mark after the first season failed to set the world on fire.
An even bigger challenge this time around, considering it’ll be arriving shortly after the second season of HBO’s The Last of Us, which is expected to be better than season one. The film adaptations we’ve gotten so far in Uncharted and Gran Turismo were able to find high to moderate financial success, respectively, but both were largely slammed by critics.
The switch to making the Horizon Zero Dawn adaptation a film instead of a TV show could transform the project from a middling sci-fi show to a stellar sci-fi film that does wonders at the box office. But at this point, Qizilbash and PlayStation Productions’ batting average doesn’t inspire confidence.
