A video for film pre-production tech appears to show an early glimpse of Sony’s upcoming Gravity Rush movie. Patapon also makes a surprise appearance.
One name among an entire roster of PlayStation game adaptations announced in 2022 was Gravity Rush – a movie based on Japan Studio’s 2012 action adventure. Other Sony game-to-movie projects listed at the time included God Of War, Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone.
Director Anna Mastro – a maker of music videos and the 2020 action-fantasy Secret Society Of Second Born Royals – was listed as the filmmaker charged with bringing Gravity Rush to the screen, though announcements went rather quiet after that.
Gravity Rush has made a surprise reappearance, though, in a presentation video recently put online by Sony. Released to coincide with CES 2024, the glitzy tech conference currently underway in Las Vegas, the video is about Torchlight, a new suite of virtual production tools designed to help filmmakers visualise their work more efficiently.
Writer-director Jake Kasdan (Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle) even shows up to explain how he used Torchlight to visualise an action scene for a film he’s working on (whether or not it’s Red One, an action-adventure starring Dwayne Johnson and due out this November, isn’t specified).
Tucked away at around the 2:15 mark, however, is a brief sequence labelled Gravity Rush. It’s what appears to be pre-vis footage of an action scene in which a character – possibly the game’s protagonist, Kat – leaps off a skyscraper and dives in the direction of a gigantic, glowing monster. There’s also a quick cut to an actor in a performance capture suit.
There’s no context given to the clip, so we can’t 100 percent say for sure that it’s an early look at the above-mentioned film or simply a proof-of-concept; that it’s labelled with the familiar Gravity Rush logo might suggest that it’s the former. It certainly doesn’t seem likely to be from a videogame, given that Gravity Rush 2 didn’t sell as expected and that Japan Studio, the team behind the first two games, was effectively shut down in 2021. Then again, the protagonist seen in the clip doesn’t look like the games’ heroine, Kat, so it’s all a bit of a head-scratcher.
Nor are we sure what to make of another surprise cameo in Sony’s presentation. Wind forward to around the 2:35 mark, and there’s a glimpse of Patapon – the cult rhythm-action puzzler game first released for the PSP handheld in 2007. The clip cuts from what looks like footage of the original game to a more photo-real shot of the same Patapon characters fighting a gigantic elephant. The footage is labelled ‘IP DEVELOPMENT GAMING/ANIME’.
Does this mean we’re in for a new Patapon game and possibly an anime spin-off to go with it? Again, we can only guess.
We’ll bring you more clarity on these projects if and when we get it.
