The viral co-op horror game that turned players into war-zone journalists in an alien-invaded New York is officially headed to the big screen. The Headliners movie now has a studio home.
By Becky Monroe — The Cinephile, CelebnMusic247
The video game adaptation boom just found its weirdest — and maybe its cleverest — new property. Studiocanal’s genre label Sixth Dimension is in early development on a feature film of The Headliners, the indie co-op horror hit from Kafi Games, in a deal revealed exclusively by Variety and reported by MovieWeb. Plot details and casting remain under wraps, which is about the only quiet thing about this project.
The game, released in 2025 by developers Lucas Bouyoux and Bruno Grégoire as a PC exclusive, has sold more than 1.5 million copies on a premise that sounds like a dare: up to eight players are journalists turned loose in an alien-invaded New York City, armed with cameras instead of weapons. The job is to snap front-page-worthy photos of the destruction, meet the team’s work quota, and survive the hostile entities and strange phenomena long enough to file — with limited film and supplies, in the tradition of extraction-horror favorites like Lethal Company and Content Warning, but played for campy, end-of-the-world comedy as much as fear.
Sixth Dimension chief Jed Benedict sold the pitch to Variety in one sentence, and it’s a good one: “In a world where attention is currency, KAFI Games’ indie smash ‘The Headliners’ struck us, along with millions of giddy gamers, as a hilarious and unique entry point into the alien invasion genre.” His comparison stack is even better: “As if ‘Cloverfield’ met ‘Ghostbusters’ via ‘Nightcrawler,’ we aim to take KAFI Games’ brilliantly original survival-horror game and watch the mayhem unfold through the cameras of the journalists who risk everything, life and limb, for the perfect shot.”
The label making it is young but validated: Studiocanal launched Sixth Dimension in February 2025, and its first release, the Silent Night, Deadly Night reboot, landed a 76% critics’ score and 77% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. And the timing is not an accident — with Resident Evil setting box office records and Street Fighter posting a franchise-best audience score, as MovieWeb notes, studios are mining games harder than ever, with Paramount’s Cyberpunk 2077 and Call of Duty films and A24’s Alex Garland-directed Elden Ring all in the works.
The Headliners Movie Gets a Studio Home
The 247 Take — Every game adaptation chases the same question: what’s the movie inside the gameplay loop? The Headliners already has one — it’s a found-footage monster movie where the monster is the news cycle, and the heroes are freelancers dying for a byline. If Sixth Dimension keeps the cameras rolling and the satire sharp, this could be the rare adaptation that arrives with its point of view built in.
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