The Last of Us creator wants the TV show to be the 'most authentic game adaptation' ever
Neil Druckmann has spoken about the upcoming show ahead of its release in a few weeks' time
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: The Last of US TV show
📢 Neil Druckmann has spoken about the upcoming The Last of Us TV show
🤔 Giving us a few more insights into the HBO adaptation
👎 He’s confident it will break the curse of bad video game adaptations
🤞 Fingers crossed it doesn’t disappoint
Neil Druckmann, the creative director of the original The Last of Us video game, has said its upcoming TV show will be the “most authentic game adaptation” to date.
Speaking in The New Yorker, Druckmann, who also had a role in creating the upcoming TV spin-off of Naughty Dog’s classic post-apocalyptic shooter, said he hopes the show will mark an end to bad videogame-to-movie adaptations, and move well beyond what the studio, and industry as a whole, has achieved in the past.
He called the Uncharted movie, which released earlier this year off the back of another Naughty Dog license, “fun” but suggested more effort is being put into bringing The Last of Us to the small screen.
“I helped create Uncharted, but it didn’t come from me the way that The Last of Us did,” Druckmann said. “If a bad version of The Last of Us comes out, it will crush me.”
Elsewhere, Druckmann and screenwriter Craig Mazin said they’ve lifted some dialogue from the original video game wholesale but faced a greater challenge over how to adapt its brutal violence.
“When you’re playing a section, you’re killing people, and when you die you get sent back to the checkpoint. All those people are back, moving around in the same way,” Mazin said. “Watching a person die, I think, ought to be much different than watching pixels die.”
As faithful an adaptation as it seems it will be, Druckman suggested it “will change things.”
“Sometimes adaptations haven’t worked because the source material is not strong enough. Sometimes they haven’t worked because the people making it don’t understand the source material,” he said.
But finding balance between change and preservation is tricky. “You think you need to fix it, and in trying to fix it you change too much, or you’ve lost what made it special.”
The first full-length trailer we’ve seen of the show stayed true to the original game, showing off several recognisable moments from Joel and Ellie’s journey across a decaying America. After accidentally leaking the release date, we’ve now got final confirmation that The Last of Us TV show will hit screens on January 15, 2023.
But with a Last of Us board game on the way amid rumblings of a third game on the horizon, and The Last of Us Part 1 that launched earlier this year, it looks like there’ll be no shortage of cordycep zombies in the next few years.
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