Sony Forms New Studio to Adapt Games for Film and TV

Sony Interactive Entertainment has launched PlayStation Productions, a new studio that will focus on mining the team’s catalog of game titles for film and television. The Culver City-based PlayStation Productions will be led by Asad Qizilbash and overseen by Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden.

“We’ve got 25 years of game development experience and that’s created 25 years of great games, franchises, and stories,” Layden noted when speaking to The Hollywood Reporter. “We feel that now is a good time to look at other media opportunities across streaming or film or television to give our worlds life in another spectrum.”

“Instead of licensing our IP out to studios, we felt the better approach was for us to develop and produce for ourselves. One, because we’re more familiar, but also because we know what the PlayStation community loves,” said Asad Qizilbash.

Sony Studios will help PlayStation Productions distribute, not produce its content. “For the last year and half, two years, we’ve spent time trying to understand the industry, talking to writers, directors, producers,” added Qizilbash. “We talked to Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Kevin Feige to really get an understanding of the industry.”

“We looked at what Marvel has done in taking the world of comic books and making it into the biggest thing in the film world. It would be a lofty goal to say we’re following in their footsteps, but certainly, we’re taking inspiration from that,” said Layden.

The team is now working on the first batch of products.  Layden noted that they don’t have ‘X number of titles that must be done by X time’. Instead, they will take time to bring quality.