For years, video game movies were the laughing stock of Hollywood. Ain’t nobody taking the people behind the Prince of Persia movie seriously. Things have been turning around in recent years, what with the Sonic movies raking it in at the box office and the Uncharted film at least not being any worse than the average goofy Hollywood blockbuster.
But is it possible for a video game adaptation to have prestige? Can it ever be awards bait? HBO is testing the waters with an adaptation of The Last of Us, the Naughty Dog video game about a man, Joel, roped into escorting a young woman, Ellie, across a zombie-ridden United States in the hopes of getting her to a lab where scientists are working on a cure to the disease that’s ravaged the world. It’s a simple concept we’ve seen many times before, but writer Neil Druckmann and his team received plaudits for digging into the story and making it something that can stand up to the best of movies and TV.
Will The Last of Us be the video game adaptation that gets video game adaptations taken seriously?
Druckmann is on board to produce the HBO show, along with Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin, who is very amped about the whole thing. “It’s an open-and-shut case: this is the greatest story that has ever been told in video games,” Mazin recently told Empire.
"They didn’t shoot anything out of their eyeballs. They were just people. And that, in and of itself, is remarkably rare in games. The fact that they kept it so grounded, and really made you feel – I had never experienced anything like it, and I’ve been playing video games since 1977."
I am pretty confident that The Last of Us has a better story than whatever people were playing in 1977, that’s a given.
The Last of Us will star Pedro Pascal and Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie. Based on the trailers and such, it looks like the story people remember from the game, but Mazin and company are prepared to change some things up to make it fresh. “Games themselves are often brilliant to play, and not at all brilliant to watch when dramatised,” he said. “Neil and I always knew to ask, ‘Why are we only doing what’s in the game? What can we do to expand?’”
The Last of Us premieres on HBO on January 15.
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