2015’s Until Dawn was an early stand-out PlayStation 4 exclusive. Developed by Supermassive Games, it effectively asked players to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to a horror movie. Everyone has yelled at characters not to run upstairs when pursued or split up to search for somebody, but Until Dawn let you make those calls.
That meant every member of the cast could die, resulting in drastically different endings depending on who made it to the credits. Now Until Dawn has been unveiled as a movie adaptation from PlayStation Productions, meaning the game that tried to be a movie is now actually a movie. So what do we know about it?
Cast and crew
Until Dawn will be directed by David F. Sandberg, who proved his horror bona fides with Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation. But to most audiences, he’s better known for DCEU movies Shazam! and Shazam! Fury of the Gods.
Sandberg will be working from a script by Gary Dauberman, an old hand at horror responsible for It, Annabelle and The Nun. He’s reworking an existing script from The Invitation‘s Blair Butler.
The cast is unknown, though the original game cast real actors as virtual characters. Top of the pile is Oscar-winning star Rami Malek, though we suspect he’s now too big to reprise the role in live-action. The rest of the cast perhaps not so much, and the likes of Hayden Panettiere, Noah Fleiss, Jordan Fisher and Peter Stormare may feature in the cast.
That said, the original concept is for a cast of late teens in trouble, so perhaps we’ll get a full recast of up and coming actors.
Story
Until Dawn is a choice-based story that reacts to your decisions. Unless Sony Pictures takes a radical approach and lets the audience vote on what the characters will do next, we suspect this aspect will be ditched.
Regardless, Until Dawn should broadly follow the game’s overall plot. Without spoiling any twists, the game is about a group of young adults looking forward to a party at a lodge on Blackwood Mountain. This being a horror movie things go south fairly quickly, and the characters are thrust into life and death situations as they tangle with strange creatures and unpick the secrets of the past.
Release date
There’s not even a vague release date as yet, though theoretically we may not have to wait too long. After all, Until Dawn is essentially a mid-budget horror movie already and shouldn’t require an enormous amount of pre-production. If we have announcement now I don’t see any reason why the shoot couldn’t begin before the end of 2024 with a release date in a Halloween-friendly Oct. 2025 slot.
More on this as and when we hear it. If you’re in the mood for more from Supermassive Games, check out my ranking of their sister series the Dark Pictures Anthology or our full ranking of the Until Dawn game cast.
