Lionsgate, which recently released Conan the Barbarian, and is currently working on the Hunger Games adaptation, confirmed that it has purchased the film rights to a Dead Island trailer.
Interestingly enough, the studio didn’t purchase the rights to the game itself, but rather, only one of the early trailers.
The trailer was an Internet sensation earlier this year, causing lots of anticipation for the game. However, Dead Island turned out to be not nearly as cool as the trailer, which contained no game footage, nor any depictions of the characters from the game. It instead showed a small family unsuccessfully fighting off a zombie attack in a bright, shiny resort hotel room.
The sequence in the trailer was produced independently of the game, and is intended to display the mood of the game’s setting, a crowded tropical resort island after a zombie outbreak, as ironically very cheery and fun looking; a discordant backdrop to a terrible tale.
No word if the new film will actually cover the story of the family in the trailer, nor if the film will feature the same sort of CGI animation, though both seem unlikely.
More plausibly, a new story will be written with only the general gist of the tale, and it will likely have nowhere near the emotional impact of this short clip, which won awards at the Canne Film Festival this year.
No names are yet attached to Dead Island, and no production or release dates have been announced beyond an indication that Lionsgate is planning a 2012 launch of the film.
