HBO’s The Last of Us premieres this week, bringing one of the most (if not THE most acclaimed video games of all time to the TV screen. As an HBO release, The Last of Us has some big clout behind it for the mainstream audience; at the same time, the gaming audience coming to the show is understandably a bit trepidacious. Given the nature of the games, it is a legitimate question how the HBO series will handle adapting the full content of the game series, which extends across two main games and a prequel game about one of the main characters, Ellie (Bella Ramsey).
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In an interview with ComicBook.com, The Last of Us executive producer Craig Mazin addressed how the showrunners are approaching chopping up the game content into multiple seasons of television:
“You look for natural endings,” Mazin explained. “One thing that’s interesting when making a television series as opposed to writing a story for a video game is that players of video games decide where they stop each time. Sometimes, too late, it’s 1am, but you stop. Sometimes you play for half an hour. For a show, we decide where it stops each time. We create beginnings and endings so we’re looking for natural endings.”
Mazin went on to admit that even getting portions of The Last of Us games into a single season of TV is a massive challenge – so planning the pace of the show (and its budget) is actually a meticulous consideration:
“We also have a certain capacity for a season of television. I mean, this is an enormous show. This season took a year of shooting, 200 shooting days, I mean HBO was great. They gave us a lot of money and we have this incredible cast, so, we need to go, ‘Okay, hey, no matter what your appetite is, we have to be able to figure out that natural end. Going forward, we have discussed, how we would do it so we have a good answer in mind that I will not tell you!”
Will The Last of Us TV Show Go Beyond The Games?
There have been a string of rumors, recently, that game developer Naughty Dog could be working on The Last of Us Part 3, making the game a formal trilogy. Naughty Dog has denied that rumor – but not before we had a chance to talk to Mazin about the larger idea of taking the show beyond the game content:
“Personally, I don’t have a great desire to go beyond what’s there currently but I know that the story of the second game is way bigger and far more complicated than the story of the first game which means there’s more story to adapt. So, if folks show up and watch this season of The Last of Us, everybody on our side and on HBO is excited to keep going and tell that story but, again, I’m a believer in endings. I don’t want to feel like we’re suddenly just treading water. I think every episode of television, if you’re going to make a television show, it’s kind of a crazy, arrogant thing to do, to expect people to watch your show. Every episode has to deliver. Every single one.”
The Last of Us will premiere on HBO this Sunday.
