Mazin also said, “So the changes that we’re making are designed to fill things out and expand.
In an interview with the BBC Sounds’ “Must Watch” webcast, series co-creator and writer Craig Mazin said of his Naughty Dog collaborator on the series, “Neil, at one point, he was like, ‘You know, there’s one thing we were talking about for a while,’ and then he told me what it was, and I was like - gonk! - OK, jaw drop, that’s going in. That said, it actually seems more likely that they’ll pull elements from The Last of Us: Left Behind, an Ellie-centric prequel set before the events of the first game.īut the series is expected to expand upon the game’s story as well, including, apparently, some elements that were previously cut from the game. It’s expected that while the show will mostly follow the plot of the first game, it may incorporate elements from The Last of Us Part II, which is set five years after the first game. As they make their way from what used to be Boston to what’s left of Salt Lake City, they run into the usual post-apocalyptic tropes, including roving groups of infected, a couple of cannibals, some huge jerks, and a giraffe who’s escaped from a zoo and is getting out while the getting is good. In The Last of Us, tough-guy survivor Joel Miller is hired to escort a teenager named Ellie through the wasteland and to some doctors who believe that Ellie may be the cure to the plague. Here’s everything we know so far about the anticipated adaptation.
Seven years after first announcing that they’d be making a movie out of the video game The Last of Us, and five since those plans collapsed, Sony is now bringing the sneaky and scary survival horror game to HBO, with some familiar names helping out.īased on the 2013 game, The Last of Us is set in 2033, 20 years after the world’s population, and thus society has been decimated by a fungal infestation of the brain that initially makes its victims violently insane and feral, and later destroys their eyes, forcing them to use echo location to find people… and rip their throats out. It was just a taste of how HBO is translating the game’s post-apocalyptic setting to the screen.(Photo by Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment) But the photo only showed the characters from behind, as they stared out towards the wreckage of an airplane at the top of a hill. While we’ve yet to see any footage from the show, a recent set photo at the very least teased the accuracy of the characters’ distinctive outfits from the original game.
In fact, it’s the breaking of this relationship that sparks the main conflict in The Last of Us Part II, the controversial sequel that set Ellie and Joel on very different paths.Īs far as Joel and Ellie are concerned, it’ll be up to Pedro Pascal ( The Mandalorian) and Bella Ramsey ( Game of Thrones) to really sell these characters to general TV audiences as well as bring the depth hardcore fans expect from this duo. At the very least, bringing on one of the game’s creators means that HBO is really striving for authenticity here, and with Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin as executive producer, the network has a showrunner with a proven track record when it comes to edge-of-your-seat drama.īut let’s face it, the main thing The Last of Us fans are going to want to know on day one is how well the show can capture the dynamic between main characters Joel and Ellie, the central relationship of the entire series. It probably has something to do with the fact that the network is taking on one of the greatest video game stories ever told.įortunately, the creative director behind the video games, Neil Druckmann, has written all of the episodes of the show’s upcoming first season, and is even directing one of the episodes. But even successful translations like Netflix’s excellent Castlevania series haven’t gone through the level of scrutiny from the fandom that’s currently aimed at HBO’s The Last of Us. Apart from one or two exceptions, video game adaptations have always been losing propositions, whether it’s Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat, or Assassin’s Creed.