Sony Pictures And Story Kitchen Team On Movie Adaptation Of ‘The Drifter’ Video Game

EXCLUSIVE: Sony Pictures and Story Kitchen have landed live-action feature film rights to the video game The Drifter. Story Kitchen’s Dmitri M. Johnson and Michael Lawrence Goldberg will be producing with Timothy I. Stevenson and Elena Sandoval executive producing the project.

The Drifter is a pulpy adventure video game where, after witnessing a brutal murder and being drowned by high-tech soldiers, a nomadic drifter awakens finding himself fighting for survival and unraveling a dark conspiracy involving shadowy corporations and a madman’s obsession. It is developed and published by Australian independent game studio Powerhoof.

Following word that Story Kitchen and Sony had landed rights, sources say top writers and directors are already reaching out to sell their pitch. While studios across town are high on video game adaptations including Sony, who has Resident Evil bowing this month, its rare to see this much attention on a game that was independently put together and not coming from one of the top-tier companies.

The Drifter won Game of the Year at the 2025 Australian Game Developer Awards where it also won for Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Narrative and Excellence in Sound Design.

As for Story Kitchen, they’re no strangers to video game adaptations with a strong slate of upcoming projects that includes Tomb Raider projects for Prime Video and Netflix; Life is Strange, which is also at Prime Video; a Just Cause movie at Universal; and Sega’s 1990s classic Streets of Rage at Lionsgate among others.

Powerhoof is a two-person indie game studio founded by Dave Lloyd and Barney Cumming. Their first game was Crawl, a dungeon-crawler game where your friends control the monsters. They followed up with Regular Human Basketball, a multiplayer party-starter, and The Drifter.

Story Kitchen is repped by WME and Pryor Cashman. Powerhoof is repped by Cam Rogers.