The Until Dawn movie hit theaters last weekend, and threw a cold bucket of water on Hollywood’s theory that video game adaptations are the wave of the future. Though the adaptation will do just fine in the long-term — it’s managed to make $18.1 million on a $15 million budget in the week since it opened — its performance was only good enough to make the top five in the United States, behind Sinners, the Revenge of the Sith’s re-release, The Accountant 2, and A Minecraft Movie.
Is there a better illustration of the fact that most video game IP is not remotely on the level of Minecraft than Until Dawn’s debut making $14 million less in the States than Minecraft did in its fourth weekend?
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Until Dawn Is A Great Game, But Not A Franchise
This isn’t the first time that Sony has gone back to the Until Dawn well only to be met with shrugs from fans. Last year, the publisher released its Until Dawn remake for PS5 and PC. It cost $59.99 (or full price, if your wallet is still stuck in last-gen) and yet players were conflicted over whether it was even an improvement.
Oblivion Remastered sparked a similar conversation as remasters have increasingly been criticized for ditching their games’ original aesthetics, homogenizing the look of triple-A in the process, but was still a far bigger hit.
The remake doesn’t seem to have sold especially well, either. On Steam, it only has 1,855 reviews at time of writing, and the rule of thumb is that you can approximate the number of copies sold by multiplying the number of reviews by ten. If that math is correct, it would mean that Until Dawn on Steam has sold under 20,000 copies. On PS5, it debuted with fewer players than Concord.
We may not have concrete numbers for either platform, but it sure doesn’t seem like it was a runaway success, especially since developers and publishers tend to shout commercial successes from the rooftops — a la Clair Obscur notching one million sales in its first week.
So, why is Sony trying to make Until Dawn happen? Well, there are a few reasons. The original game was a surprise hit, and the formula doesn’t seem that complicated. On a basic level, the Until Dawn equation is to take some Hollywood actors, make a cinematic horror game with high production value and low interactivity.
And yet, attempts to replicate it have largely failed. The Quarry definitely has fans, but Supermassive’s other games (The Dark Pictures Anthology entries Man of Medan, Little Hope, House of Ashes, and The Devil in Me, plus The Casting of Frank Stone) have tended to get mixed reviews and don’t seem to make much of an impression in the broader gaming conversation. Even when the games are well-received, like The Quarry, they aren’t sales behemoths.
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Until Dawn Is Deceptively Easy To Adapt
But Until Dawn seems like it should be easily replicable. Take a beloved horror sub-genre, add a great cast, profit. And as the Hollywood Gold Rush for franchisable video game IP has hit a fever pitch in recent years, you can’t blame Sony for thinking that Until Dawn would be really easy to adapt.
The problem is that it’s deceptively easy to adapt. Until Dawn is basically an eight-to-ten hour movie already. It’s going for the playable movie vibes of Telltale, not the more active survival horror of Silent Hill or Resident Evil. It stars well-known actors like Rami Malek and Hayden Panettierre. It’s playing into ‘90s slasher tropes. It seems that turning it into a movie should be easy. But when it’s already a movie, there’s nothing for you to do, and what seems easy becomes much harder to pull off.
But Until Dawn hit the same iceberg that many video game adaptations will hit. When you remove interactivity from something that is self-consciously trying to deliver the feeling of playing through a ‘90s slasher, you’re left with, well, just an okay ‘90s slasher. Until Dawn is a great game, but it’s a great game — not a great movie. As Sony attempts to make Until Dawn happen, it’s important to remember that you can’t get blood from a stone. Not even Frank Stone.
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