Amazon announces showrunners for Fallout TV adaptation

The Wasteland can be a dangerous place, and soon, we’ll be going there for the first time ever in a live-action television show. We learned last year that Amazon Studios had acquired the rights to develop a television show based on the Fallout video game series by Black Isle Studios and later rebooted by Bethesda Games. Since then, news about the series has been sparse…until now.

As Deadline reports, the Fallout TV show is moving forward at Amazon. We already knew that Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy were attached to the show, which is one of the commitments they’re making under their big Amazon deal. Amazon is making Fallout in coordination with Joy’s Kilter Films studio and Bethesda Softworks.

“Fallout is one of the greatest game series of all time,” Joy and Nolan said at the time. “Each chapter of this insanely imaginative story has cost us countless hours we could have spent with family and friends. So we’re incredibly excited to partner with Todd Howard and the rest of the brilliant lunatics at Bethesda to bring this massive, subversive, and darkly funny universe to life with Amazon Studios.”

In case you’re not familiar, Fallout is a post-apocalyptic game series that combines the aesthetic of World War II-era America with the burnt-out nuclear wastelands of an alternate future. The games typically follow someone who survived the nuclear holocaust in an underground vault, but then has to venture forth into the irradiated landscape on some quest or other. The first game, which was released back in 1997, focused on Southern California, but since then installments have been set in Appalachia, Washington D.C., Boston, Nevada, and plenty of other places. Fallout and Fallout 2 were classics of the ’90s era of roleplaying computer games, but the series gained newfound steam when Bethesda Games (developer of Skyrim) revived the series in 2008 with Fallout 3. More games have followed, and the series shows no sign of slowing down.

Neither does the show, because a few of the other creatives attached to Amazon’s Fallout adaptation have finally been announced.

Captain Marvel writer and Silicon Valley producer are showrunners on Fallout

In addition to Nolan and Joy, who are best known for their work on HBO’s Westworld, Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Silicon Valley) have signed on to develop the Fallout adaptation. Robertson-Dworet and Wagner will be serving as showrunners. Robertson-Dworet was one of the co-writers of Captain Marvel and the 2018 Tomb Raider film. Wagner was an executive producer on Portlandia and co-executive producer on Silicon Valley and Baskets. Combined with Nolan and Joy’s hard sci-fi work, that gives the creative team behind this show a wide range of experiences to draw from…which might just be perfect for the darkly comedic tones of Fallout. Nolan is also set to direct the pilot episode.

Video game adaptations can be a notoriously tricky beast, and the annals of film history are littered with examples of projects gone awry. But with the success of stuff like Netflix’s Arcane, things are looking up.

What do you think? Are you excited for Amazon’s adaptation of Fallout? Nervous? Let’s talk in the comments.

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