While Hollywood doesn't have the best track record when it comes to faithfully adapting popular video games into blockbuster films, I have high hopes for the upcoming movie based on Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain for the Sony PlayStation 3 entitled, simply, Rain.  After all, Heavy Rain was already basically a film in game form, and while the film will have to pick a single narrative path and go with it throughout the duration (no replays or branching paths here!), there's enough backstory and narrative gravitas in the game already that synthesizing it all out into a movie shouldn't be too much of a labor.  Variety has the details on what we can expect from Rain:

David Milch is heading into Heavy Rain, signing to adapt the noir-style videogame with Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne producing through their Unique Features banner.

As first reported on Variety.com, Rain is being developed via Unique's first-look deal with Warner Bros., which is fast-tracking the project. Milch will start writing Rain once he's finished work on the first season of HBO's horse-racing series Luck, on which he's creator and exec producer.

Heavy Rain, based on the Sony Computer Entertainment game released last year, spans four days of mystery and centers on the hunt for a murderer known as the Origami Killer. Four characters, each following his own leads and with his own motives, take part in a desperate attempt to prevent the killer from claiming a new victim, with each character's decisions affecting the plans of the other three.

Milch has a big following from his role as creator/exec producer of NYPD Blue and Deadwood.  "David Milch's incredible ability to transform intense and complex storylines into gripping, popular drama makes him the perfect partner for us to have on Heavy Rain," Shaye said.

This is a landmark moment.  We're seeing the beginnings of a movie based on a video game that does not feature vampires, zombies, supernatural artifacts, sentient dinosaurs from an alternate reality, a pan-dimensional martial arts tournament, or the Pax Bisonica.  Rain could finally give the genre the respect that it's deserved all along. 

(via Joystiq)