Horizon Zero Dawn movie is on the way, but will it be a problem for the makers to make it as distinctive as possible than Avatar?

Sony is gearing up for a Horizon Zero Dawn movie. In the world of gaming, movies based on video games are nothing new; for example, Hitman: Agent 47, Mortal Kombat, Uncharted, and many more. Now it seems Guerrilla Games is also following the same footsteps.

Horizon Zero Dawn was released in 2017. | Credit: Guerrilla Games.

Horizon itself is a massive franchise for Sony. The first installment of the sci-fi action RPG series was released in 2017 and has since become a popular name in the gaming fraternity. So, Sony thought, why just restrict itself to the gaming world and not let it expand into the silver screens? However, some uncanny similarities with another famous movie franchise might get the upcoming movie in some bit of trouble.

Horizon Zero Dawn movie is now officially announced

Horizon Zero Dawn will surface on the silver screen very soon. | Credit: Guerrilla Games.

Sony has just announced a film adaptation of Horizon Zero Dawn. At Sony’s CES 2025 press conference, the partnership between PlayStation Studios and Columbia Pictures was revealed.

The popular 2022 film Uncharted, which starred Mark Wahlberg as Victor Sullivan and Tom Holland as Nathan Drake, replacing Nolan North, was produced by Columbia Pictures. This is what the head of PlayStation Productions, Asad Qizilbash, had to say about this project on the stage of CES:

Columbia Pictures and PlayStation Productions are at the early stages of developing a film adaptation of the award-winning Horizon Zero Dawn. Just imagine, Aloy’s beloved origin story set in a vibrant, far-future world filled with the giant machines, brought to you for the first time on the big screen.

Machine Hunter Aloy is the protagonist of Guerrilla Games’ wildly successful post-apocalyptic adventure title. However, there was no announcement of the movie’s release date; all we know is that the movie is in its “early stages” of development.

The recently announced movie will, like the game, tell the origin story of the main character Aloy in a fallen futuristic world, but that is all we currently know about them after an attempt to make it into a Netflix series failed.

Is the Horizon Zero Dawn movie going to be an Avatar ripoff?

Horizon Zero Dawn looks a lot similar to Avatar. | Credit: 20th Century Studios.

After the news broke out, the gaming world erupted in joy knowing their favorite character, Aloy, would carry on her journey of finding out her past. However, there is a catch. The Horizon franchise is already quite similar to James Cameron’s Avatar, in terms of animal-machine correlation, beautiful in-game scenery, and many more. It seems HZD is finding a lot of similarities with different franchises.

This was all about the game having many uncanny similarities with the Avatar franchise. Now, just imagine when the same game is turned into a movie. how similar it would be to Avatar, which is also a movie as well. Not just the in-game aesthetics; the stories of both the installments are similar as well.

In Avatar, Jake finds a tribe of people just like Aloy, except she is in one of the tribes in Horizon Zero Dawn. People who control machines and want to take huge places (Meridian and the great tree), and Jake/Aloy have to work alone or with the tribe/s in order to save the world. However, we still can’t brand the HZD movie as a ripoff of Avatar.

In addition to being a thematically rich text, the game was a technical marvel that challenged us to consider our relationship with technology and the companies that advance it in novel ways. So defining the term “rip off” too narrowly doesn’t improve our understanding of art and shouldn’t be used as a gauge of success.