Adapting anything for television is no easy feat, especially video games. Over the years, we’ve seen many beloved video game franchises get butchered when they make the jump to the screen, from Assassin’s Creed to Doom to even Super Mario Brothers. So when HBO announced ambitious plans to create a live-action TV show based on Sony’s award-winning game The Last of Us, it was met with a mixture of excitement, fear and curiosity. Will it be a worthy adaptation or will it pale in comparison to its video game counterpart?
The game’s creative director Neil Druckmann is also producing the show, alongside Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin. He recently spoke to IGN about how the show will be different from the game, and how it will be the same.
The Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic adventure game. Battle-hardened smuggler Joel is tasked with escorting 14-year old Ellie — a girl who appears immune to the infection that has devastated the world — out of a tyrannical Quarantine Zone and across both bandit and zombie-infested lands in search of a cure. The show has already cast two Game of Thrones veterans as the leads: Pedro Pascal (Oberyn Martell) will play Joel and Bella Ramsey (Lyanna Mormont) Ellie.
So what changes can we expect from the TV show? “As far as the superficial things, like should wear the same plaid shirt or the same red shirt? They might or might not appear in it, that’s way less important to us than getting the core of who these people are and the core of their journey,” Druckmann said.
That’s probably a sensible move: making the characters feel true to the source material is more important than exactly matching their wardrobe choices. That said, there are plenty of things that will be lifted directly from the games. “Things sometimes stay pretty close,” he said. “It’s funny to see my dialogue there from the games in HBO scripts. And sometimes they deviate greatly to much better effect because we are dealing with a different medium.”
"For example, in the game, there’s so much action you have to have to train the player about mechanics. You have to have more violence and more spectacle to some degree than you would need on a TV show because you don’t need to train people on how to use a gun. So that’s something that’s been really different, and HBO’s been great in pushing us to move away from hardcore action and focus more on the drama of the character. Some of my favorite episodes so far have deviated greatly from the story, and I can’t wait for people to see them."
As for when we might see the show, it looks like production is moving along nicely. “I just saw the first prosthetic test for the Clicker and it’s awesome,” Druckmann said. “It’s so rad to see this thing come to physical life.”
Let’s hope The Last of Us translates well to TV, where it’ll go toe-to-toe with other post-apocalyptic dramas like The Walking Dead.
Raccoon City is “a character” in the upcoming Resident Evil movie
And The Last of Us isn’t the only big video game adaptation coming down the pike. There’s also a new Resident Evil movie on the way, and director Johannes Roberts revealed the title to IGN: Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.
“Obviously, there is the Resident Evil franchise and this movie doesn’t have anything to do with that,” Roberts said indicating a clean break from Paul W. S. Anderson’s long-running series of Resident Evil movies. “It’s a whole separate origin story based in the roots of the and the world of horror.”
As the title suggests, the zombie-infested city itself will be at the center of the story. “It’s an ensemble piece, and Raccoon City plays a big part and is a character in the movie,” Roberts said. “It’s about this group of people all coming from different angles — some coming into town, some already having grown up in this town — meeting over this one fateful night.”
"The big thing for me on this movie is tone. The thing that I loved with the games was they were just scary as hell, and that is very much the atmosphere. It’s raining constantly, it’s dark, it’s creepy… and then mixed with the sort of more fun side, especially with the first game, of what’s ‘round the corner — that kind of style of storytelling."
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City will land in theaters on September 3. HBO’s The Last of Us show doesn’t have a premiere date yet. These are still early days. In the meantime, we’ll have to play both the original game and its sequel again.
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