Sony continues to mine its many video game properties for screen adaptations, and CinemaCon attendees Monday night were treated at a look at the first trailer for the next one: Gran Turismo.
Stars Orlando Bloom and David Harbour were on hand during Sony’s presentation of its upcoming movie slate, with Harbour joking that he didn’t really understand what the Gran Turismo movie was at first: how do you make a movie out of a racing game with no story? “It’s a racing simulator!” Harbour said he complained to director Neill Blomkamp.
Of course, the movie tells the true story of a teenaged Gran Turismo player who successfully managed to make the leap from gamer to real-life professional racer–it’s a bit different from your standard video game movie adaptation.
Harbour acknowledged that his joke about not understanding the movie was pretty weak, and blamed the writers’ strike for the quality of the joke.
And then Harbour and Bloom presented the trailer. It focuses on a British kid named Jann, played by Archie Madekwe, who’s joined up with the GT Academy, a skills competition with Nissan that sought to find gamers who could translate their digital racing skills to real-life cars.
Harbour plays the racing drill sergeant for these gamers, trying to whip them into shape at this racing boot camp, with Jann emerging as the winner and moving up to the ranks of Nissan drivers. But that’s just the beginning of Jann’s journey.
Real racing is a whole new ballgame, Harbour’s character warns.
“If you miss a racing line in a game you can reset. If you miss it in a real race, you could die.”
And, as we also saw in the trailer, Jann also has to deal with his new social situation–the other racers at Nissan look down on him because of lowly gamer origins.
The Gran Turismo movie doesn’t yet have a release date, but is expected to hit theaters later this year.
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