An Acclaimed Cosmic Horror Game Is Becoming A Movie — With A Surprising Twist
A fan-favorite horror game is coming to the screen in an unexpected way.
The days of the “video game adaptation curse” are well and truly over. Now, The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Minecraft Movie are dominating box office records of past years, and The Last of Us is becoming one of the centerpieces of HBO’s prestige TV lineup. Now that any video game is on the table, there’s no telling what could be next — even Weapons’ Zach Cregger is making a Resident Evil movie.
It appears as though the next big video game movie will take on one of the most beloved video games of the 2010s — but don’t expect a Game of Thrones-style fantasy epic. Instead, this is going a completely different route.
Bloodborne’s Lovecraftian cosmic horror will make the jump to a narrative film, but in an animated form.
During Sony’s presentation at CinemaCon, the company announced a movie adaptation of Bloodborne, the brutal and gory cosmic horror game released by FromSoftware in 2015. According to Variety, Sanford Panitch, president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group, promised the movie would be “very true” to the gory spirit of Bloodborne. Just in case there are fans out there worried this movie will be created by non-gamers, Seán McLoughlin, aka JackSepticEye, is listed as a producer.
However, there’s one big twist to this upcoming project: it’s an animated feature. It’s not a family-friendly animated feature by any means — it’s expected to be R-rated — but it won’t be live action at all. Instead of being like the Netflix Witcher series, it’ll be more like the Netflix Witcher animated movies.
Bloodborne perfected the Dark Souls video game formula. How well will that translate to R-rated animation?
This is a polarizing choice. Bloodborne had incredibly detailed visuals, so if those are reduced to cartoonish aesthetics, then the entire Lovecraftian vibe of the original story won’t be taken seriously. However, if the movie is entirely animated, then special effects like the complex fantasy combat and magic elements would be a lot easier to replicate, especially on a budget.
If any studio can do an animated Bloodborne movie justice, it’s absolutely Sony, the studio behind the Spider-Verse trilogy. But this is a cult classic game that fans have poured dozens of hours of playtime into, one that is very personal to certain fans. Standards are definitely going to be high for such a high-profile game and such a risky medium choice.
