The Until Dawn Video Game Is Getting A Must-Watch Movie In April — But It’s Not Quite The Same As The Original

Until Dawn was a video game that released in 2015, and it absolutely rocked the world of every single video game lover everywhere. Not only was its 3D facial technology the first of its kind, throwing players straight into a video game that looked like a movie of its very own, but the 10+ hour gameplay time was full of hidden secrets, special endings, and thrilling choices that would lead players to receive a different ending every time.

Until Dawn is by far one of the most renowned games its studio, Supermassive Games, has released. It was most notably followed by The Quarry in 2022, a related choose-your-own-adventure horror game that had a similar cast, premise, and gameplay to Until Dawn.

But the original Until Dawn game still stands as one of the most celebrated and iconic games of the 2010s, a booming decade for indie games. Played by a number of famous streamers and watched over and over again by fans even now, everyone wanted more Until Dawn content — but nobody expected it to be in the form of a movie.

Adapting Until Dawn to screens is a complicated task, primarily because of the fact that it features a whopping 256 ending variations. Though these variations can be small or large depending on the choices you make throughout the film, it’s still quite clear that Until Dawn relies on a large amount of character interaction that makes the endings more or less satisfying depending on your gameplay.

Though there is a general ending that is most widely accepted among fans as the favorite, adapting this particular ending to screens wouldn’t all be easy. It’s especially crucial to note the fact that Until Dawn already acts and looks like a playable movie in itself; it features extensive cutscenes and realistic character rendering using professional actors — including Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere — and 3D modeling. Bringing the film to screens would upset fans if the original voice actors didn’t reprise their roles, given their recognizability, but keeping everything the same as the original franchise would mean an exact copy of Until Dawn that adds nothing content-wise.

Thus, the filmmakers decided to take a completely new direction; loosely base a brand new story off of the original Until Dawn game. The plot of the film starts similarly to Until Dawn, where a girl and her friends go searching for her missing sister, who vanished a year prior. 

The film also uses a plot that has a major throwback to the original Until Dawn gameplay; rather than being stalked by supernatural creatures in the woods, the characters of the Until Dawn movie must die again and again at the hands of a masked killer. The only way to escape their fate is for every single one of them to survive, well, until dawn. 

Fans of the original Until Dawn game will recall the fact that players were encouraged to play the game over and over again in an effort to save every single one of the characters, often going through a vast amount of character deaths time and time again to figure out the puzzle behind the story. Here, the goal was also to merely help every character survive until dawn. The movie’s version of adapting this gameplay element is actually quite clever, and it’s a solid way of keeping the original film in mind while changing the plot significantly.

The movie does feature several elements from the original game as well, including the masked killer and a few supernatural beings who appear to emulate a few of the scares from the Until Dawn video game. While the trailer makes things seem quite different from the 2015 version of the story, fans couldn’t be more excited to see what awaits them in Until Dawn 2025 — and it’s probably a relief to many that the movie isn’t trying to be an exact copy of the original video game.