First set photo from The Last of Us season 2 shows video game location come to life
By Dan Selcke
The second season of HBO's zombie drama The Last of Us is being filmed now, and we know because images are starting to leak from the set. Over on a subreddit dedicated to the show, the Redditor breadfruitworrywitch (great name) posted an image of a building people will recognize if they played The Last of Us: Part II video game from Naughty Dog. Click here to see the image on Reddit.
HBO has gone and recreated the Greenplace Market, a grocery store that players encounter early in the second game, which will form the basis for the basis for the second season of the show. (Mild spoilers follow.) When we catch up with Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) in the second video game, they've settled into new lives in Jackson, Wyoming. Sure, the world is still full of fungal zombies, but at least the pair now have community and a roof over their heads.
Everyone in Jackson has jobs. Since they survived a cross-country trip through zombie-infested territory, both Joel and Ellie go on regular patrols outside Jackson, where they scope out areas where zombies may still be roosting. We meet new characters who join them of these patrols, including Jesse (Young Mazino) and Dina (Isabela Merced). It's on one of these patrols that Ellie and Dina brave the inside of the Greenplace Market, which is infested with zombies.
The Greenplace Market is a pretty unimportant area, all things considered; mostly it's a obstacle for the player to clear while they learn more about the bond between Ellie and Dina. The fact that it's been recreated for the HBO show suggests that the showrunners are sticking pretty close to the source material, which makes sense given that one of them is Neil Druckmann, the creative director behind both Last of Us video games.
Changes will have to be made, for sure. The Last of Us: Part II is much more expansive and narratively complicated than the first game, to the point where the other showrunner, Craig Mazin, has said that he expect it to take more than one season of TV to adapt. We'll keep an eye out for other set photos as filming rolls on.
Also, this is a personal theory, but now that I'm thinking about it I wonder if the developers of The Last of Us games named the Greenplace Market after the Green Place from the movie Mad Max: Fury Road, which came out in 2015. These are nerds we're talking about, so I wouldn't be surprised, and I approve.
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