Sony has officially announced that the Gran Turismo movie will be released next year.
Deadline reports that the film, simply titled Gran Turismo, currently has a release date of August 11, 2023.
Neill Blomkamp (Demonic, Chappie, Elysium, District 9) is set to direct the movie, which will be produced by Sony’s Columbia Pictures studio.
The screenplay has been written by Jason Hall, who previously wrote American Sniper and Thank You for Your Service.
According to Sony’s brief plot description: “Based on a true story, the film is the ultimate wish fulfilment tale of a teenage Gran Turismo player whose gaming skills won a series of Nissan competitions to become an actual professional race car driver.”
This suggests the film could be based on the GT Academy contest, which was run by Nissan and Sony between 2008 and 2016 and gave winners a place in Nissan’s Driver Development Programme.
One of the most notable real-life success stories of the GT Academy is UK racer Jann Mardenborough, who won in 2011 and has since gone on to compete in the GP3 Series, the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Japanese Super GT series.
Gran Turismo is one of a number of video game based film and TV projects currently in the works at Sony.
Sony announced last month that, along with Gran Turismo, the company is also working on TV adaptions of God of War (with Amazon) and Horizon (with Netflix).
In 2019 the company formed PlayStation Productions, a studio created to adapt its original game properties for film and television in partnership with Sony Pictures.
January’s Uncharted movie starring Tom Holland, which had a $120 million budget, was the first major PlayStation Productions project to be released.
The studio has also just wrapped on the Last of Us HBO TV series
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