Ellen Page is going to be in a comedy about an all-women esports team

Ellen Page in Beyond: Two Souls — (Image credit: Quantic Dream)

As the Hollywood Reporter reported, there's a movie about esports called 1Up currently in the works. Ellen Page will play the team's coach, and Paris Berelc the star of the show, a young player who quits a mixed team to start her own all-women's team. It's being directed by Kyle Newman, director of Fanboys, from a script by Julia Yorks, who writes kid's TV shows. According to the Hollywood Reporter, 1Up "has been described as being in the vein of Pitch Perfect but set in the world of eSports with a Gamergate backdrop."

I don't know about you, but I hadn't got over my yikes at "in the vein of Pitch Perfect" before I hit "with a Gamergate backdrop" and experienced a rare double-yikes. But maybe the description is deceptive, and it's not what it sounds. Ellen Page is a great actor (you should watch The Umbrella Academy), and she endured being in a David Cage game, so maybe she knows enough about the World of Gaming to pick a project that will handle its subject matter with care.

Here's the summary:

"The story centers on a female gamer named Vivian Lee who quits her college eSports team rather than put up with sexism from her male counterparts. But with her scholarship on the line, she is forced to assemble a Varsity caliber, all-women's team that can compete with the boys. With the help of an enigmatic coach who returns to the spotlight after her own GamerGate scandal, the young woman recruits an unlikely crew of unskilled misfits to kick some serious gamer butt."

1Up is going into production in Toronto some time in November. There's no word on what game will be featured—maybe a knock-off of Overwatch designed by the people who make the atrocious fake shooters teens play in detective shows? We can only hope.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.