New Video game adaptation, based on one of my favorite PlayStation games of recent years.

‘Until Dawn’ Video Game Movie in the Works From David F. Sandberg, Gary Dauberman (Exclusive)

It's a horror reteaming of the director and writer who scared audiences with 'Annabelle: Creation.'



Filmmaker David F. Sandberg, who has spent the past several years in the land of superheroes, is returning to his horror roots.

The Shazam! helmer has signed a deal to direct Until Dawn, an adaptation of the PlayStation horror video game being made by Screen Gems and PlayStation Productions. All three units fall under the Sony corporate umbrella.

Gary Dauberman, the screenwriter behind hit horror franchises It, Annabelle and The Nun, is doing a pass on the a script originally written by Blair Butler, who previously wrote Sony’s vampire thriller, The Invitation.



Dauberman, who late last year signed a first-look deal with Screen Gems and Sony to deliver horror movies, is producing Until Dawn under his Coin Operated banner. Also producing are Sandberg and Lotta Losten via their Mangata shingle, as well as Roy Lee of Vertigo Entertainment, and PlayStation Productions’ Asad Qizilbash and Carter Swan.

First released in 2015, Until Dawn is an interactive horror video game that follows eight friends and frenemies who are brought together at a remote mountain retreat. With live-or-die scenarios featuring a mysterious killer, cannibalistic wendigos, a cable car and a long-ago mining cave-in that reverberates into the present day, the members of the group must fight through their fear if they all hope to make it through the night in one piece. The game proved to be a surprise hit with critics and received numerous gaming awards nominations.

The logline for the feature adaptation is kept deep inside the caves, but Screen Gems is describing it as an R-rated love letter to the horror genre, centering on an ensemble cast.

Overseeing for Screen Gems are newly appointed head Ashley Brucks, as well as Michael Bitar. Screen Gems’ Dan Primozic closed the rights and shepherded the dealmaking for this package.

PlayStation Productions has ramped up its slate in recent years, and last year saw The Last of Us, Gran Turismo and Twisted Metal move from the console world to the big and small screen.



Dauberman has an adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, which he wrote and directed for Warner Bros., in the can. He is also developing a live-action take on 1980s animated series Gargoyles for Disney+.

Sandberg made horror shorts in his native Sweden before one of the films, Closet Space, caught Hollywood’s attention. He made his feature debut with New Line’s Lights Out, a low-budget hit, and then was tasked with taking on Annabelle: Creation, an entry in the Conjuring horror universe written by Dauberman that scared critics and audiences alike to the tune of $305 million worldwide on a $15 million budget. He brought some of the scary movie sensibilities to his first DC movie, 2019’s Shazam!, the well-regarded coming-of-age superhero movie starring Zachary Levi. He most recently directed Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which ended up being part of 2023’s superhero contraction.

Should be a cheap movie to make. All you gotta do is record a random playthrough and release as is. Heck, you could even revive the Clue theatrical model, given all the possible conclusions of the game.

I like the director. I wonder if we will start seeing more video game IP since they’re getting a pretty good handle on adapting it.

After all the talk in the video game section and now this, I am going to have to check this out on my PS4.

I loved The Quarry (its spiritual successor) so much, I ended up ordering a disc copy of Until Dawn. I look forward to playing it soon.

Yeah. Looks like those are my two next games to play from all the rave reviews here for both.

Figure someone should throw this in here:



Can't believe the game is almost a decade old.

If there's a word that's the opposite of star-studded, that's the word I would use to describe this cast.
When your game has recognizable stars in it, but the movie adaptation doesn't, that sounds like a problem.

Yeah, how does this not have Hayden and Malek in it?

Outside Odessa A'zion, their combined Filmography is fairly thin.

Michael Cimino was in Annabelle Comes Home (2019). Not sure if I would call him a rising star.

Finally a name I recognize casted. And coming back to the same role!

X - Formerly Twitter

Filming begins this month

"Confirmed"? Wasn't all that already confirmed ages ago? And with the remake video game come and gone (with little to no fanfare), what is Sony even hoping to accomplish with the IP? Are they going to announce the rumoured video game sequel close to the movie's release date?

So it's a loop? And, based on that description, for some reason I am thinking the ending will be similar to that of Identity.

A loop takes all danger and scare out of the film. What was cool about the game was that it was just the opposite of that -- if a character died because of your mistake, they were gone for good.

Making a non-interactive movie based on a game that was essentially an interactive movie was already bad idea. I guess they decided to go all in with what the great Kirk Lazarus warned not to do.

I never played the game but that clip above didn’t make make much sense. “Every time they die, they get to come back and try again but in order to survive they must stay alive…until dawn”. So which is it, do they keeping dying and coming back to try again or do they have to stay alive until dawn?!

Isn't that Groundhog Day? He has to keep coming back and trying again until he has the perfect day.

Yup. It's as if the writers of the movie knew the title of the game and that Peter Stormare played a psychiatrist and felt that was enough to adapt it into a movie.

Looks fun enough for what it is.

I keep thinking it to be like the TNG episode Cause and Effect, or more recently Loki S2. Similar to Groundhog's Day, but you're actually trying to figure out a way out of the loop.

It looks terribly generic. It's as if someone took a random Blumhouse script and slapped the title Until Dawn on it. Hard pass.

That being said, calling it now that only one of the main characters is real and everyone else is in the defacto protagonist's head.