Elliot Page is making a TV show out of weirdo video game Beyond: Two Souls

Now that the freshly reinvigorated video-game-to-TV-and-movies pipeline has schlorped up some of gaming's biggest brands—as with the billion-dollar Super Mario Bros. movie—and its most respected—via titles like the Last Of Us TV show—it's now clearly having to look a little further afield for name-brand adaptation materials. How else can we explain news today that Elliot Page has started development on a TV adaptation of 2013 "interactive drama" Beyond: Two Souls, a game whose only major selling points are that it starred Page and co-star Willem Dafoe, at a time when it was relatively rare for A-list talent to go slumming it in games?

As with basically every game ever developed by French studio Quantic Dreams (whose other credits include Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human), Beyond was more interesting in theory than in actual play. The game put you in control of a young woman named Jodie (Page) who has an invisible ghost friend who can also be controlled, allowing you to get up to various shenanigans that involved things like the "Infraworld," the C.I.A., and the mysterious "Black Sun." (Spooky!) Also like most Quantic Dreams games, it got bemused eyerolls from critics, who praised its ambition but dinged its execution and weirdly hokey plot.

People liked Page and Dafoe though, which might explain why Page is now turning this thing into a TV show. (His past with the franchise was a bit less rosy; he explored legal action against Sony back in the day, after Quantic Dreams developed a nude model of the Jodie character for shower scenes that were obscured in the game, but which players got their hands on and started passing around images of. Page, who didn't do nude body scans for the motion-capture heavy game, and who's never appeared nude in film, was reportedly not happy.) Page, whose Pageboy Productions has acquired the rights to the franchise, sounds a lot warmer on the game now, saying in a statement that, “Filming the game was one of the most challenging and fulfilling acting experiences of my career. The story’s rich narrative and emotional depth offer us a fantastic foundation. We want to create a unique vision of the characters and their journeys that resonates with fans and newcomers.” News of Page developing the show comes amidst other, darker news in the world of video game adaptations: It sounds like Justin Baldoni's plans to turn Pac-Man into a movie have gone awry, an actual thing that happened, and not just an absurd thing we made up to end this Newswire on; who could have possibly guessed?

[via Deadline]