For years, seeing the words “video game adaptation” attached to a movie or television show inevitably felt like a warning.
Until The Last of Us.
Based on the hit video game from developer Naughty Dog and distributed by Sony, HBO’s nine-episode drama was an easy success when it debuted in January, earning rave reviews and the second highest rankings for a series premiere since 2010 with 4.7 million viewers across HBO and HBO Max.
Actually, The Last of Us only grew more popular within the weeks after launch, notching higher rankings to achieve 7.5 million viewers by the fourth episode.
Within the hands of series creators Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann (a co-creator of the unique game), the show deftly balances the unique, action-packed source material with the narrative nuance afforded by serial TV. Along the way in which, the show has not only grabbed audiences, but provided a winning template for other game franchises to follow.
It hasn’t all the time been this fashion.
From 1993’s notoriously reviled Super Mario Bros. live-action movie to last yr’s disastrous Netflix version of Resident Evil, game adaptations have failed to copy what fans loved most after they held a controller of their hands.
In a way, these early efforts were almost doomed to fail. “The executives, producers, writers, and directors were often not gamers themselves,” says Keith Calder, executive producer of Starz’s Blindspotting and the Oscar-nominated film One Night in Miami.
“Often some or all the key decision makers…didn’t view video games as creative works of intrinsic merit, but relatively a technique to money in on popularity in youth culture,” says Calder.
But Mazin and Druckmann never saw The Last of Us as a money grab. As a substitute, they correctly stayed loyal to the sport while expanding on themes or characters with clear dramatic potential.
Consider the highly acclaimed third episode, “Long, Long Time,” which took a pair of supporting characters from the sport and gave them wealthy, LGBT-themed backstory that became a viral sensation.
Leonard Chang, an executive producer on FX’s Snowfall and author on Justified, notes how television – way over movies – allows for this sort of interpretive flexibility.
“Long-form storytelling can take more time with diversions, flashbacks, secondary and even tertiary characters,” he says; finding space for “Long, Long Time’s” heartbreaking Gay love story “could be very difficult to shoehorn…right into a two-hour film.”
The Last of Us is predicated on the hit 2013 game a couple of post-apocalyptic journey taken by a smuggler named Joel (Pedro Pascal within the show) and a woman named Ellie (Bella Ramsey within the show), who will be the key to saving humanity from ravenous, fungus-infected zombies.
Greenlighted by HBO in November 2020 and filmed in Alberta from July 2021 to June 2022, the nine-episode first season concludes tonight, March 12th, and a second season has already been approved by HBO.
Asad Qizilbash, Head of PlayStation Productions, the subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment that handles film and TV versions of Sony games, and an executive producer on The Last of Us understands what made the show work so well. “The world, story and characters of the sport were already so wealthy, emotional and well fleshed out,” he explains to the Post.
And Like Chang, Qizilbash says translating this world over multiple hours for the small screen allowed The Last of Us to succeed where way more limited game-to-film adaptations (like Super Mario Bros.) had failed.
“In games you might be telling a story over 15+ hours, so attempting to squeeze that story right into a 120-min movie, and tell it well, is de facto difficult,” he says. “Due to the period of time we now have to inform a story through TV, we are able to dive more into characters and side-stories.”
Beyond the series’ sheer run time, The Last of Us, says veteran games journalist Alex James Kane, also succeeded because its writers and producers aimed for an audience far broader than simply gamers.
“You’ll be able to imagine any person with none knowledge of [The Last of Us game] taking a likelihood on it and just falling in love with the characters,” says Kane. “It doesn’t feel like a video-game adaptation; it just plays like a solid horror epic.”
The writers of The Last of Us also made sure to never talk all the way down to their viewers. Video game adaptations are sometimes made to copy the experience of “playing” something. Clumsy and inelegant, the resulting productions fail to either impress gamers nor attract non-gamers.
But The Last of Us succeeds since it never looks like it’s attempting to be a “game.” It’s a drama that’s taken a light-weight hand with its source material, treating it more like an inspirational novel than sacred screed. And this sense of literary experimentation influences every episode.
Can the identical thing occur with other games? The industry definitely hopes so.
For one thing, there’s big money in video games. In keeping with industry data, Americans spent $55 billion on video game products in 2022 alone. An enormous library of existing content is already waiting for Hollywood to come back calling.
“Once Star Wars and Archie Comics and Batman are all spoken for, video games are the subsequent logical thing. Everyone knows what Grand Theft Auto is; everyone knows Skyrim,” says Kane.
Still, it is going to take money to become profitable: while exact numbers remain elusive, The Last of Us likely cost no less than $5 million per episode to supply, higher than even Game of Thrones.
Nonetheless, those eyeing the success of The Last of Us will need to speculate in the correct people at a moment when the entertainment industry is being battered by austerity measures. “I hope the…networks and streamers will trust top-tier creative talent with running those shows. But that’s a taller ask,” Calder adds.
Despite early duds like 1999’s bomb Wing Commander, there’s signs that the subsequent generation of video-to-screen adaptations could actually resemble the primary. Indeed, one among the best-known titles in gaming history, Tomb Raider is ready for a 3rd round of adaptation.
Launched back in 1996, the large game series has been interpreted by two actresses on film—first in 2001 and 2003 with Angelina Jolie after which in 2018 with Alicia Vikander. Now it’s being rebooted by Amazon Studios featuring Emmy-winning Fleabag star and creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
The co-star of the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Waller-Bridge brings a level of gravitas and certain creative control that would elevate Tomb Raider to Last of Us -levels of sophistication. There are also reports that the show may include a tie-in video game and even a movie.
Prime Video can be working on a series based on the hit Fallout, a 10-game franchise that debuted in 1997 and has sold thousands and thousands of copies.
Yet one more post-apocalyptic drama, Fallout incorporates a particularly cinematic retrofuturist aesthetic. Helmed by Westworld showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan , Fallout is for certain to be ambitious; the solid includes Twin Peaks-vet Kyle MacLachlan.
After all, the longer term for the game-to-TV pipeline can be dominated by Sony. The studio solidified its industry status with the establishment of PlayStation Productions in 2019, which created a pipeline that its competitors have yet to completely replicate.
Corporations like Activision and Ubisoft have launched media divisions, but they inevitably find yourself selling their content to established studios or networks to develop. With PlayStation Productions, Sony maintains a style of creative control over the variation process that’s already yielding hits – as evidenced by The Last of Us.
Up next for Sony is the hit gaming series God of War – whose 2022 installment God of War: Ragnarok became the corporate’s fastest-selling PlayStation exclusive ever.
For a long time, God of War was in a form of development limbo with a giant screen adaptation first revealed in 2005 and writers announced in 2012. But production never began and by 2021, the film appeared dead.
But late last yr, the series was officially announced on Amazon with acclaimed writers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby of sci-fi show The Expanse, attached to the series.
The success of The Last of Us could thoroughly push the scribes even further of their quest to bring the saga of the mythological warrior Kratos to life.
Sony has also partnered with Netflix to develop the series Horizon 2074, which is predicated on Horizon, an motion franchise that’s released a trio of acclaimed games since 2017’s launch title Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Qizilbash admits to already taking “so many lessons” from The Last of Us that would impact these projects. Chief amongst them, the importance of “tak[ing] creative risks – a few of my favorite moments in The Last of Us show weren’t taken directly from the sport, but additive,” he says.
Meanwhile, NBC’s Peacock streaming platform could also emerge as a powerful game-to-television force with the premiere of this yr’s Twisted Metal.
Shot last summer with a possible 2023 release, Twisted Metal games are centered around chaotic, driving simulation set-ups certain to evoke Mad Max-styled lunacy on the small screen. Anthony Mackie, Stephanie Beatriz, and Will Arnett will star.
As for non-Sony properties, Mass Effect is an incredibly deep game franchise that has already seen a series of tie-in novels, comic books and even an animated film.
Warner Bros. tried to make a live-action film for years, but it fell apart due to the issue in adapting its free-wheeling universe right into a single cohesive story. Broadcasting on Amazon will inevitably make this process easier.
Shows like Mass Effect and Twisted Metal are literally just the tip of the iceberg. There are movies based on the games Bioshock, Death Stranding, Metal Gear Solid, Just Cause, and Ghost of Tsushima in various stages of production, while Assassin’s Creed, Devil May Cry, Gears of War, and Alan Wake are potentially being developed for TV.
While The Last of Us has clearly impacted how studios develop television, it could also change the way in which developers create games themselves.
Narratives might develop into more streamlined while countless motion scenes could possibly be reduced in an effort to higher set them up for television down the road.
“I believe people can [now] see the potential of their games reaching broader audiences through TV and movies,” says Qizilbash, ”so games [will be seen] as global entertainment franchises versus only a single video game release.”
Brian Tallerico is Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com and President of the Chicago Film Critics Association