PlayStation Vita game Gravity Rush is becoming a movie

Generally, at least part of the motivation behind turning a video game into a movie (or a TV show) is the built-in name recognition. You say “here’s A Guy Who Is Basically Indiana Jones With His Shirt Half-Tucked” and people might not care, but you say “here’s Uncharted” and people will say “ah yes, the video game.” But that doesn’t work as well when the game you’re adapting has been plucked from relative obscurity, as writer Emily Jerome and director Anna Mastro are doing for Scott Free Productions.

Deadline says they’re working on a movie based on Gravity Rush, a well-liked action game released in 2012 for the PlayStation Vita… and we already feel like we’re on the back foot here. See, the PlayStation Vita was Sony’s to the PlayStation Portable console… and the PlayStation Portable was a handheld game console like a Game Boy but made by Sony… and a handheld game console is like your smartphone, but it just plays games and doesn’t make phone calls… except for the ones that did make phone calls. Oh, and phone calls are the thing that Gen Xers do instead of texting.

So Gravity Rush was a video game where you played as a woman who could manipulate gravity, allowing the player to fly and walk on walls. It was sort of like Crackdown on the Xbox family of consoles, but more straightforwardly superhero-y and less of a police state satire about super-cops. It makes a good amount of sense as a movie, assuming it can get a nice enough budget to pull off some twisty gravity shenanigans, even if it is a PS Vita game from a decade ago.

As for Anna Mastro and Emily Jerome, the former worked on Disney+’s Secret Society Of Second Born Royals and directed episodes of The Rookie, The Bold Type, and Echoes. The latter, Jerome, Deadline says she’s an “up-and-coming screenwriter” who was on the 2017 Black List and has an existing relationship with both Scott Free and Sony (with Sony at least indirectly producing this through its PlayStation Productions label).

Just this year, PlayStation Productions has began moving forward with adaptations of God Of War, Ghost Of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Gran Turismo, not to mention existing projects like Twisted Metal and The Last Of Us.