The ‘Bloodborne’ Movie Has a Writer and Director: Jacksepticeye’s Update, What’s Confirmed and What It Means
Seven months after Sony stunned a CinemaCon ballroom by announcing an R-rated animated Bloodborne movie, the hunt finally has hunters. Producer Seán McLoughlin, the YouTuber millions know as Jacksepticeye, told IGN in an interview published this week that the film now has a writer and a director attached, and that the project has moved much further down the pipeline than it was in April. He didn't name them. But for a fanbase that has spent more than a decade begging Sony for anything new from Yharnam, even a vague progress report counts as a blood vial.
It also lands at a strange time for FromSoftware fans. Just yesterday, the studio's gothic vampire game The Duskbloods slipped to 2027, and A24's live-action Elden Ring is already shooting. Below: everything confirmed about the Bloodborne film, who's making it, how we got here, the numbers behind the gamble, and what this update really tells us (and what it doesn't).
Watch: The Hunt That Started It All
There's no footage from the film yet. Sony hasn't released a teaser, a poster or a single frame. So here's the official PlayStation TV spot from the game's 2015 launch, a reminder of the tone fans expect the movie to match.
And here's McLoughlin's own announcement video from April, posted to his channel the day after CinemaCon, where he explains how he ended up attached to the project.
The Details: What's Actually Confirmed
- Format: an animated feature film, aimed squarely at adults. Sony announced it as R-rated.
- Studios: Sony Pictures is financing and distributing, co-financing with Lyrical Media. PlayStation Productions and Lyrical Animation (Lyrical Media's animation arm) are producing.
- Producer: Seán "Jacksepticeye" McLoughlin.
- Creative team: a writer and a director are now attached, per McLoughlin. Names have not been announced.
- Story: McLoughlin says it will be a new story set in Yharnam, not a beat-for-beat retelling of the game.
- Release date, cast, animation style: none announced.
That last point matters. Every outlet that picked up the IGN interview, from iHorror to Pixel Twelve and tbreak, landed on the same conclusion: this is a progress report, not a reveal. McLoughlin said the team has much more mapped out than at the announcement and that he hopes the creative names can go public sooner rather than later. Some coverage has floated The Game Awards in December as a natural stage for a reveal, but nobody involved has promised that, so treat it as speculation.
Who's Behind It
Seán McLoughlin (Jacksepticeye). The Irish creator's main channel has more than 31 million subscribers and over 17.5 billion views across 5,000-plus videos, according to Push Square. Variety put his total online following at around 48 million. He's been a loud FromSoftware evangelist for years, and in his April video he called the project a dream come true. He was also quick to set expectations: in a video covered by GamesRadar, he said plainly, "I'm a producer, I'm not the writer or director." In a later IGN interview reported by Kotaku, he insisted the film isn't a money play for him and that he's approaching it as a fan.
What does a YouTuber producer actually do here? In September, on the podcast 100 Questions with Tom Simons , McLoughlin described his job as something like the project's vibe-checker, with real input into who gets hired, according to tbreak's write-up. In other words, the guy on the hook for whether this feels like Bloodborne is a superfan with a massive audience that will tell him, loudly, if it doesn't.
Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions. The announcement came from Sanford Panitch, president of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Motion Picture Group, who told CinemaCon the movie would be "very true" to the game's gory spirit, per Variety. PlayStation Productions, launched in 2019 under Sony Interactive Entertainment, is the in-house engine behind Sony's game-to-screen push.
FromSoftware. Here's the hole in the story: no source has reported any creative involvement from FromSoftware or Bloodborne director Hidetaka Miyazaki. Sony owns the Bloodborne IP as the game's publisher, so it doesn't need FromSoftware to make a film. Whether Miyazaki's team gets a consulting role is one of the biggest open questions.
Photo: Hidetaka Miyazaki via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
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The Backstory: Ten Years of Waiting for Yharnam
Bloodborne launched on PS4 on March 24, 2015. Developed by FromSoftware, directed by Miyazaki and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, it swapped the medieval armor of Dark Souls for Victorian streets, beast plagues, blood-soaked hunters and a slow slide into cosmic horror. It sold over a million copies in under two weeks, and Sony announced it had crossed two million by September 2015. The Old Hunters expansion followed that November.
Then: nothing. No sequel, no remaster, no PS5 update, no PC port, not even a 60fps patch, despite years of fan campaigns. A sales sheet that leaked in the December 2023 Insomniac Games ransomware attack put the game at about 7.46 million copies sold through early 2022, per WN Hub's breakdown of the leak. That's leaked data, not an official figure, but it shows a game that kept selling for seven years with zero new content.
The movie timeline is short. McLoughlin hinted during his 2024 Thankmas charity stream that he was working on something he couldn't discuss, Tubefilter noted. Sony made it official at CinemaCon on April 13, 2026, alongside updates on its Helldivers movie (Justin Lin directing, Jason Momoa starring) and Nintendo's live-action Legend of Zelda. The backlash was immediate, and McLoughlin owned it: in September he estimated that roughly 80% of early reactions to his involvement were critical, mostly surprise that a YouTuber was attached to such a beloved game. Now, in late October, comes the writer-and-director update.
By the Numbers: Sony's Game-Movie Track Record
PlayStation Productions' theatrical results have been all over the map, according to figures compiled on its Wikipedia page from box office trackers:
- Uncharted (2022): about $401.7 million worldwide on a $120 million budget. A clear hit.
- Gran Turismo (2023): about $121.9 million worldwide on a $60 million budget. Modest.
- Until Dawn (2025): roughly $50 million worldwide on a $15 million budget, with a 51% Rotten Tomatoes score and a C+ CinemaScore. The studio's only horror film so far, and a cautionary tale.
On TV, the picture is much rosier: HBO's The Last of Us is the gold standard for the whole genre and has been renewed for a third season, and Peacock's Twisted Metal is headed into Season 3 too. The lesson Sony seems to have learned: the adaptations that win are the ones that respect the source.
Analysis: What This Update Really Means
Animation is the smart bet. McLoughlin argued in the IGN interview that animation suits Bloodborne better than a live-action approach like the one A24 is taking with Elden Ring , and he's right. Yharnam's horror runs on impossible scale: towering beasts, eldritch Great Ones, architecture that folds in on itself. Live action would need a nine-figure budget to do that justice. A24's Elden Ring , written and directed by Alex Garland and dated for March 3, 2028 in IMAX, reportedly costs well over $100 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter as cited by VGC. That's the studio's biggest swing ever. Animation lets Sony chase that cosmic dread for a fraction of the risk, and it frees the film from the uncanny valley that sinks so many creature-heavy game movies.
The R rating is the promise that matters. Adult animation has proven it can carry dark fantasy: think Netflix's Castlevania and Arcane on streaming. A theatrical R-rated animated horror feature is a rarer beast, which makes Sony's commitment to that rating the most encouraging line in the whole announcement. A PG-13 Bloodborne would have been dead on arrival.
A new story is the right call, too. Bloodborne 's plot is famously cryptic, told through item descriptions and half-mad NPCs. Retelling the game's exact path would either over-explain the mystery or confuse everyone. An original hunt inside Yharnam lets the film keep the lore's ambiguity while giving newcomers a story with an actual spine. It's the same approach that worked for The Last of Us when it took detours, and the opposite of Until Dawn , which used the game's name for a loosely connected time-loop slasher and paid for it.
The YouTuber factor cuts both ways. We argued just this week that Hollywood keeps finding horror's future on YouTube and then wasting it. McLoughlin is a different case: he isn't directing, and his value is as a fan advocate inside the room. If he really has a say in hiring, the director announcement will tell us whether that voice carries weight. A respected genre name would quiet a lot of that 80% skepticism overnight. An anonymous hire would feed it.
The stakes. For Sony, this is a test of whether PlayStation's horror-adjacent catalog can deliver on the big screen after Until Dawn stumbled. For fans, it may be the only new Bloodborne they get for years, with no sequel or remaster in sight and FromSoftware busy elsewhere.
What We Still Don't Know
- Who the writer and director are.
- Which studio is actually animating it, and in what style (2D, CG, anime-influenced).
- Whether FromSoftware or Miyazaki will be involved in any capacity.
- Voice cast, runtime and a release window. No date has been set.
- Whether the film goes to theaters or lands on a streamer. Sony is distributing, but hasn't said where.
The next big moment to watch: The Game Awards in December, a natural place for a creative-team reveal, though nothing is confirmed.
The Bottom Line
This isn't the reveal fans want, but it's the first proof since April that the Bloodborne movie is a real production and not just a CinemaCon slide. The ingredients are promising: R-rated, animated, an original story in Yharnam, and a producer who has more to lose with gamers than anyone at Sony. Now the whole thing hinges on one name: the director. Fear the old blood, and keep an eye on December.
Your turn: who should direct an R-rated animated Bloodborne ? And are you in, or still on Team Skeptical?
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Header photo: Jacksepticeye (Seán McLoughlin) by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
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