On January 15, 2023, the long-awaited TV series The Last of Us will premiere on HBO, and for this reason the producer Neil Druckman and the showrunner craig mazin conducted an interview with The New Yorker discussing their collaboration. Video game adaptations don’t have a good reputation, but the creator of The Last of Us promises that this will be the best and most authentic to date.
In the interview Neil Druckmann said that an adaptation of The Last of Us has been planned since 2014, a year after the release of the first title for PlayStation 3, but back then Sony’s idea was to make a movie. The producers of the film were going to be those of the Resident Evil series with Milla Jovovich and the director was going to be Sam Raimi, but eventually the project was canceled and Druckmann considered that it was better to create a series.
Neil Druckmann’s biggest concern was not being able to condense 15 hours of gameplay into 2 hours of story for a movie, something that Craig Mazin, the Chernobyl showrunner for HBO, agreed with. The two eventually went from mutual fanboys to collaborators and have big ambitions for The Last of Us series.
Neil Druckmann is sure that the television series of The Last of Us “It will be the best adaptation of video games and the most authentic”, although Craig Mazin said he cheated because “I just took [el videojuego] with the best story”. In recent days it has been questioned whether the story of The Last of Us really is the best that video games have to offer, but there were other comments that aroused more controversy.
“We hope that [la serie de The Last of Us] put to sleep the curse of [adaptaciones de] video gamesaid Neil Druckmann, to which Mazin laughed and said that “it’s going to make it worse”. It is not a lie that video game adaptations usually offer disappointing results, but it is also true that in recent years we have seen some of the best, starting with Arcane and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners this year.
As expected, Neil Druckmann’s experience making The Last of Us television series will influence the development of Naughty Dog’s next video games, as he said that for the next one he formed a writers’ room similar to those of the series and movies .
