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The next video game movie, Until Dawn, is in theaters now, but we recently learned that director David F. Sandberg almost passed on it. He said in an interview that he considered giving up on IP-based films after the negative reaction to his superhero movie, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, over which he said he received death threats.
“I mean, to be honest, fans can get very, very crazy and very angry with you. You can get, like, death threats and everything so after Shazam 2, I was like, ‘I never wanna do another IP-based movie because it’s just not worth it,'” Sandberg told GamesRadar.
However, Sandberg said he read the Until Dawn script and thought it would be “so much fun to do,” so he ultimately signed on to make it. Specifically, Sandberg said he latched onto the movie’s core storytelling conceit, which is that the story plays out in a time loop where the survivors have to face a different horror threat each night.
“I really thought it was brilliant of the writers to come up with this time loop idea where the night starts over because then you do kind of get that feel of the game, when you’re replaying it and making different choices. I think it’s very much in the spirit of the game,” he explained.
When the Until Dawn movie was announced, some people took issue with how the film was not a direct adaptation of the game but instead a new story. However, Sandberg said adapting the game’s story would have come with its own set of challenges as well.
“I think we would’ve gotten a lot of critique if we had tried to [recreate the game], because people would’ve been like, ‘It’s not as good. It’s not the same actors, because, you know, they’re older now,'” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to better the game, so you’d just be in a losing situation.”
Until Dawn is out now and had a reported production budget of $15 million. It’s expected to bring in as much as $10 million in the US alone this weekend, according to box office tracking estimates.
