The Gran Turismo movie veers away from its real-life inspiration into full-on gamer cringe

A little way into the movie Gran Turismo, the unlikely brand extension of Sony’s sim racing games accidentally satirizes itself. “This whole thing is a marketing extravaganza!” excitable auto executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) shouts at salty racing coach Jack Salter (David Harbour). They’re aboard a helicopter wheeling above a racetrack, where Salter’s students in the GT Academy — a real-life program intended to turn players of Sony’s Gran Turismo games into actual racing drivers — are being put through their paces. The helicopter is an absurd bit of theater for the TV cameras, and Salter knows it. But he’s powerless to resist the marketing apparatus around him.

The video game movie opened with $1.4 million in Thursday previews.

«I know a lot about sitting in a video gaming chair playing video games,» Harbour joked.

How far have you ever gone to show your love of a video game? Many have gone to great lengths to show their passion for gaming titles over the years. Some love to purchase the “Collector’s Editions” of AAA titles to say they have the “premiere goodies” outside of the game. For artists, they love to draw fanart and show off their favorite characters, moments, etc. Nintendo fans are known for buying lots of merch from their favorite franchises, but one Pikmin 4 fan decided to go on a treasure hunt. One that directly reflects the “treasures” you get in the game.

A decade ago, when Sony Pictures first announced its plan to adapt the PlayStation racing sim Gran Turismo into a movie, fans of the franchise were bemused. Two big questions — How? And why? — were quickly answered: The Gran Turismo movie would be based not on the video game, but on the real-life story of a player turned professional racer.

We got to chat with Jann Mardenborough, the “gamer to racer” subject at the heart of the Gran Turismo movie, with topics ranging from his experience in GT Academy to stunt driving for the film about his incredible life. 

While Team Rocket may not be the most subtle evil team to come out of the Pokemon mainline, it seems they really fumbled the bag this time. Team Rocket may be restricted to just your phone screen, but for this Reddit user, Team Rocket’s down the street. A funny coincidence has turned meme on social media as people draw similarities between Team Rocket and a suspicious-looking building.

Gran Turismo is a Neill Blomkamp-directed film based on the popular PlayStation franchise. It tells the tracks the tale of how Jann Mardenborough turned his love of Gran Turismo games into a fully-fledged motorsport career. Though the wide release for the USA is set for August 25, the film has aired in international markets, reception has been good thus far, and it has been reported that the film has already grossed $22.7 million.

Ever since the huge successes of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Uncharted, and The Last Of Us, films and TV shows adapted from video games have been all the rage in Hollywood. But when Neill Blomkamp received a call from Sony asking if he wanted to direct a movie based around its super-serious, hyper-realistic racing game series Gran Turismo, he was initially confused.

David Harbour might not be a former racing legend in real life, but he did get an extremely hands on experience for Gran Turismo. 

The first reviews of the Gran Turismo movie are in, and the response is mixed.

There are few video game creatives as tireless in their pursuit of perfection as Kazunori Yamauchi. The head of the Polyphony Digital studio, and creator of Gran Turismo, is a motoring obsessive whose project for the last 25 years has been to build an interactive temple to cars and motorsport. He lives and breathes this quest. Between 2009 and 2016, he raced GT cars in 24-hour races, then gave the development team notes on exactly how it should look when the sun comes up over the Nordschleife Nürburgring.