Parthenope: development team specifies that the game has no relation to Sorrentino’s film

The Italian software house Katabasi Studio has sent a press release to clarify how the game it is currently working on has nothing to do with the movie of the director Paolo Sorrentino presented at the Cannes Film Festival. Why was there a need for this clarification? Easy: they are both called Parthenope.

Apparently some journalists confused the two works and proposed the official trailer of the video game as a trailer for the film, creating a lot of confusion. Katabasi then wrote: “we would like to underline that the homonymy of the projects is limited to the title, not the contents.”

The risk is that “if the official Parthenope trailer were inserted in the articles and mistakenly credited to the film, a major and dangerous communication problem would be perpetuated which would not benefit Sorrentino’s magnificent film nor our video game.”

the error

It must be said that in this case the error, although present, was favored by the homonymy of the two works, which ends up creating an overlap that we would define as natural, also given the proximity between the announcement of the game and the arrival of the film at Cannes.

Having said this, Katabasi reiterated the esteem of all the members of the studio “for Sorrentino’s cinema”, an esteem already expressed in the press release announcing the game on 24 April 2024 (so the homonymy was in some way already known) . Furthermore, Katabasi Studio said they were proud of the fact that the game’s trailer “was liked to the point of passing it off as a cinematographic film“, but he is also keen to reiterate that these are two completely different projects.

As mentioned, the film Parthenope was presented at the Cannes festival, where it divided critics, with reviews releases so far that have been very negative towards the film, as can be seen on Rotten Tomatoes. The protagonist of the film is the actress Celeste Dalla Porta, but the presence of Gary Oldman in the cast should also be mentioned, albeit in a secondary role.