Days Gone, Sony’s zombie survival-on-a-motorbike game, is getting a movie adaptation. Deadline report that Sony PlayStation Productions is developing the project with Sheldon Turner attached as writer and Outlander’s Sam Heughan attached to star.
Days Gone is set in a post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest and stars outlaw-turned-wife-guy Deacon St. John as he journeys to discover whether his wife Sarah, previously presumed dead, is actually alive. As a game, it was praised for some of its systems, unfavourably compared to Sony’s other post-apoc story The Last Of Us, and gently mocked for its story. We thought it was best when you made the bike invisible.
Sony PlayStation Productions are moving forward with developing the project in the wake of their first film adaptation, Uncharted, which was released in cinemas earlier this year. Uncharted, which stars Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, made close to $402m worldwide (around £341m). (Despite being extremely mediocre, sez I.)
Screenwriter Sheldon Turner’s previous credits include Adam Sandler American football film The Longest Yard, a story-by credit on X-Men: First Class, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for co-adapting the screenplay for George Clooney movie Up In The Air. The Deadline story says the Days Gone adaptation will be a “love ballad to motorcycle movies”.
It’s worth noting that these sorts of announcements do not mean that a film will definitely happen. A production house “developing” a film means that they’ve hired someone to write a script, and projects can go through multiple scripts, writers and premutations over years and never reach the stage of filming. The Uncharted movie entered development in 2008, 14 years before it was eventually released, at which point Tom Holland was 12 years old.