“It’s Just Never Going To Be the Same Thing”: ’Until Dawn’s David F. Sandberg and Blair Butler Explain Differences From the Game [Exclusive]

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Until Dawn

One of the most anticipated releases of 2025 is an upcoming horror movie, which doubles as an adaptation of a beloved PlayStation video game. Until Dawn is creeping closer and closer to the big screen, and it has the chance of becoming a a big hit when it comes to video game adaptations. The highly popular game is already innovative on its own, which is why fans are eager to see what director David F. Sandberg (Shazam! Fury of the Gods) and screenwriter Blair Butler (The Invitation) have come up with in order to keep things fresh. Luckily for Collider fans, we were able to ask them just that.

The first trailer revealed that, even though Until Dawn is paying homage to the game's famous mechanics, it's wandering off to tell its own independent story. During an interview with our Collider's Aidan Kelley, Sandberg and Butler talked about the differences that they felt were necessary and what has been kept the same — and why. The director kicked things off by revealing why they are not trying to re-create the Until Dawn full experience with the adaptation:

"That's what I loved so much about the script when I read it, was that it didn't just try to do the game again. Because again, the game is the closest thing that I've played to an interactive movie, but it pretty much is already a 10-hour movie. To cut it down to two hours or something, it's just never going to be the same thing. I thought it was really brilliant to have this resetting thing built into the movie so you can still get that thing you have with the game where you play it over and over again and make different choices so you get to see different deaths. I thought that was a brilliant way to keep that in movie form in a movie that's not interactive."

'Until Dawn' Will Play With Different Horror Tropes

Butler added that they saw in Until Dawn the perfect opportunity to create a "love letter to horror movies," because they got to play with different subgenres of horror in one go. The screenwriter also revealed that, since they knew a remaster of Until Dawn was set to be released around the same time as the movie, they felt it would be "a little blasphemous" to recreate the game beat by beat instead of expanding the experience for fans. Additionally, the director and writer both confirmed that the Until Dawn movie does take place in the same world as the game, meaning its taking a similar approach to Prime Video's Fallout and is being treated as canonical with the game that inspired it.

Until Dawn (the movie) will tell the story of a group in search of a lost girl who gets directed by Peter Stormare to a location in which they die in horrible ways — and then come back to life. They soon realize that in order to figure out what the heck they walked into, they will need to survive until dawn breaks. The cast also features Ella Rubin (Anora), Michael Cimino (Never Have I Ever), Ji-young Yoo (Expats), Odessa A'zion (Ghosts), Maia Mitchell (Good Trouble).