Talk about speedy. Director Neill Blomkamp (“District 9”) is back making studio films with his latest pic, a feature using the video game brand, “Gran Turismo,” that debuted back in 1997. Even though it only just wrapped principal photography towards the end of December, we’re already getting a glimpse of the upcoming Sony Pictures film. The studio has now released a sneak peek video (See below) with some footage from the film featuring main cast members and some brief footage from the film.
“Turismo” is based on the true story of a teenage gamer turned professional racecar driver, Jann Mardenborough. An interesting take on a video game “adaptation,” taking cues from real-life events rather than strictly the game’s in-universe. It stars Orlando Bloom, David Harbor, Archie Madekwe, Darren Barnet, British pop singer Geri Halliwell Horner, and Djimon Hounsou. PlayStation Studios is producing with a script penned by Jason Hall and Zach Baylin. Again, the turnaround is quite impressive given that its release date has been set for August 11 of this year and gives Blomkamp’s post-production team around eight months to put together a final edit before it hits theaters.
Here is the film’s official logline from Sony:
“Based on the true story of Jann Mardenborough (Madekwe), the film is the ultimate wish fulfillment tale of a teenage Gran Turismo player whose gaming skills won a series of Nissan competitions to become an actual professional racecar driver.”
This somewhat grounded racing movie will be clearly different than something like 2014’s “Need For Speed,” another recent video game adaptation that starred Aaron Paul (“Breaking Bad”) as a driver in a fictional illegal high-speed race on public roads trying to outrun authorities in super-charged cars. “Gran Turismo” is one of many upcoming projects connected to the popular PlayStation exclusive library of video games, including HBO Max’s “The Last of Us,” debuting later this month, a live-action series based on “God of War” at Amazon, another feature film based on the mature Feudal Japan samurai game “Ghost of Tsushima” with Chad Stahelski attached to direct, and even more projects on the way beyond that as Sony continues to mine their in-house IP.
Blomkamp is best known for visual effects-driven sci-fi action films, so seeing the filmmaker pivot to a different kind of storytelling within the sports genre is certainly welcomed. Meanwhile, he’s expected to return to the genre he’s best known for by developing “District 10” at the studio with his wife/screenwriting partner Terri Tatchell, a sequel to his breakout hit “District 9” produced by Peter Jackson. That original installment explored a version of Earth where a group of worker-class aliens are forced to settle in Johannesburg slums (mirroring South Africa’s apartheid) after their ship stopped working and moved to a new location by an evil corporation looking to exploit their technology for a nefarious weapons program.
You can watch the aforementioned sneak peek of “Gran Turismo” below and get excited for its release this summer.