GRAN TURISMO: Kosinski In Talks To Direct Film Adaptation

Kosinski In Talks To Direct Gran Turismo Movie. Oblivion director, Joseph Kosinski is in early negotiations to direct a film on Sony’s hit PlayStation exclusive video game franchise Gran Turismo. Columbia Pictures co-president Michael De Luca and freshly minted VP Matt Milam will act as producers on the project.

Plot details have been kept under wraps but back at Gamescom in 2013, Gran Turismo lead designer Kazunori Yamauchi said the movie would focus on a video game player turned racer. Those rumours seem to no longer apply as it appears that Kosinski intends to develop his own script with the studio.

Gran Turismo Synopsis:

Gran Turismo is a popular and critically acclaimed series of racing video games developed by Polyphony Digital. Developed exclusively for PlayStation systems, Gran Turismo games are intended to emulate the appearance and performance of a large selection of vehicles, nearly all of which are licensed reproductions of real-world automobiles. Since the franchise’s debut in December 1997, over 70 million units have been sold worldwide for PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable, making it the highest selling video game franchise under the PlayStation brand.

Adapting Gran Turismo as a film is definitely an odd choice. The Gran Turismo games are car racing simulators that are all about driving and upgrading cars and lack the juicy narrative elements and lovable characters that video game players long to see when their favourite franchises are adapted to the big screen. With no hero, no antagonist, no humour and no dramatic elements, one has to wonder what the benefits of bringing Gran Turismo to the big screen are?

Kosinski spent a couple of years trying to develop a racing film over at Fox, only to have it fall apart despite being linked to big names like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Perhaps linking up with Sony and Gran Turismo was Kosinski’s best shot at finally getting that simmering racing story in his head to finally come to a boil. In today’s re-write, reuse and recycle movie making climate, it appears that the increasingly risk adverse studios would rather adapt tangentially related, narratively vapid titles with name recognition than invest themselves in creating fresh properties.

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Source: Polyphony, Wikipedia,