Shortly after it first came out, a film adaptation of Naughty Dog’s critically acclaimed video game “The Last of Us” was in the works.
Then it spent years languishing in development hell at Screen Gems and Sony, frozen until HBO came in and picked up the property as a TV series that things finally got underway on the adaptation.
So why could they never get it to work as a movie? Game director Neil Druckmann, who wrote the proposed film and is heavily involved in the series that is being produced, tells Script Apart podcast (via IGN) that the film never worked because it fixated on action set-pieces:
“When I worked on the movie version, a lot of the thinking and notes were like ‘how do we make it bigger? How do we make the set pieces bigger?’ It didn’t work for The Last of Us and I think that’s ultimately why the movie wasn’t made.
Our approach for The Last of Us was ‘Let’s make it as an indie film’. Let’s approach it as an indie film team, the way it’s shot, the way how small and intimate it feels. And with the show, we get to lean into that even more because we don’t have to have as many action sequences as we do in the game.”
That fits the material which is a combat and stealth-based survival game with a strong narrative praised more for its nuanced storytelling and characters than its big action set-pieces.
It also fits in line with the directors like Kantemir Balagov, Jasmila Zbanic and Ali Abbasi who have been hired to helm the episodes of the series. Druckmann says they’ve also managed to ditch one aspect of the game that makes no sense – the tutorial aspect:
“In the game, there are certain mechanics for pacing purposes. You have to engage those mechanics every once in a while, you need enough combat to train those mechanics. And you can throw all that out [for the TV show] because now we’re in a different medium. Let’s play to the strengths of this medium.”
Druckmann writes the series with Craig Mazin (“Chernobyl”) while Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey are set to star. Filming is slated to kick off in July.