SAN FRANCISCO — The new trailer for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time emphasizes the movie’s videogame roots.

Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince clambers up buildings, takes massive flying leaps over rooftops and, yes, even does some wall jumps in the clip, released Wednesday by Disney. The high-flying action sequences will likely give the movie, due out May 28, 2010, a very videogame-y flavor. Even so, Disney is hoping the big-budget Jerry Bruckheimer production will be the first film to escape the stigma of movies based on games.

The stunt scenes, for which Gyllenhaal underwent training in parkour, are “an aspect of the movie that I think has worked really well,” said Prince of Persia creator and the film’s screenwriter Jordan Mechner at a screening of the trailer last week in San Francisco. “It put a big smile on my face.”

Mechner has good reason to smile: He’s been trying to get a Prince of Persia movie made since 1993, a few years after the original game was released for the Apple II computer. Ubisoft’s 2003 revival of the series was key, Mechner said, in getting Disney and Bruckheimer excited about his pitch.

He described the film, the plot of which is based off that 2003 revival and not the 2008 game, as a swashbuckling adventure set in the world of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

“Swashbuckling has been around since the beginning of cinema,” he said, but “it’s a genre that’s ready to be reinvented.”

The setting has “always been fascinating to filmmakers,” Mechner said, but in his estimation, the last time Hollywood tackled the Arabian Nights milieu with such gusto was The Thief of Bagdad (1940).

The film will be directed by Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco) and co-star Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina.

Like the Sands of Time game, the movie’s plot will center on the Dagger of Time, a powerful mystical object that lets its wielder rewind time and get a do-over on life. In the game, this is used whenever the player dies and needs to go back five seconds before he jumped into a pit of spikes. In the movie, said Mechner, it’ll be used a bit less frequently.

“If you took the dagger’s powers and transferred it to a movie, the hero would be omnipotent,” he said. To avoid spoiling the story, Mechner wouldn’t reveal more, but said Gyllenhaal’s character “has to be very careful” how he uses the dagger.

And what of the game that started it all? Last year, the website Jeux-France reported that Ubisoft would make a movie tie-in game to release in 2009. Yes: the game of the movie of the game.

The game publisher has made no announcements, but Mechner did let slip that something is in the works. “Ubisoft Montreal are working on something that I’m excited about,” he said, saying that he expects an announcement in a few months about the future of the Prince of Persia game series.

Mechner, having made the leap from directing games to writing movies, doesn’t want to leave forever. “I love making games, I love making movies, I love writing graphic novels,” he said, adding that he hopes to continue working in all three media.