PlayStation Productions has pivoted its Horizon Zero Dawn adaptation from a Netflix television series to a big-budget theatrical feature at Sony's Columbia Pictures, a change the article argues is a mistake because it strips away the narrative space a multi-season series would have offered to do justice to the sprawling video game saga. The project's troubled history, including a shelved earlier version and workplace controversy around its former writer, adds further uncertainty to a franchise that Netflix had once championed as a flagship video game adaptation.

The show was originally developed from 2022 by Steve Blackman, known for The Umbrella Academy, but a July 2024 Rolling Stone report detailing allegations of toxic workplace behaviour against him led Netflix to shelve his version. When the project resurfaced in 2025, PlayStation Productions head Asad Qizilbash confirmed the shift to a film format, telling Variety the Netflix series "just wasn't creatively going how we wanted to."