news culture The Last of Us: the HBO series will crush Game of Thrones on this specific point
The least we can say is that The Last of Us series is a very ambitious project. It will notably be produced by HBO, which has not skimped on resources with a huge budget, beating that of Game of Thrones for each of the first five seasons.
A series that bets big
Since we heard about the series The Last of Us by HBO, we feel that it is a huge project around which ambitions are massive. The famous chain did not pretend by putting Craig Mazin on the spot (the man behind the famous Chernobyl series) as well as Naughty Dog himselfwith the participation of Neil Druckmann, the co-writer of the first The Last of Us and the director of the second video game.
In many ways, the series promises to be extremely faithful to the original material and it is not the few trailers already published that will say the opposite: the universe is recognizable among a thousand and necessarily, this reconstruction of the United States in ruins, demolished by an epidemic and a formidable civil war, has a price. A really price massive.
A bigger budget than Game of Thrones
The news just came : the budget allocated to this first season of The Last of Us is already greater than that dedicated to each of the first five Game of Thrones seasonsanother ultra-popular HBO series that was already breaking records in its day.
Composed of ten episodes, more than 100 million dollars have been deployed: “it has five art directors and employs an army of hundreds of technicians. It had six months of preparation and was shot (in Alberta) for 12 months”specified Damian Petti, president of the local union 212 of the International Alliance of the stage employees a few months ago.
As The New Yorker indicates in a long article dedicated to the series The Last of Us, published very recently, it is the reconstruction of the sets and the effort of loyalty that have cost the most. The production worked in particular in close collaboration with Naughty Dog to stick as well as possible to the universe, but also to the characters and enemies infected with cordyceps, this famous harmful fungus which gave rise to the epidemic.
The sound aspect is not left out, either. “Shortly after the VFX meeting, Mazin, Lesko and a group of editors and mixers came together for the final phase of the sound design process, during which they went through each episode, identifying errors and inconsistencies.”
The first episode of The Last of Us will air on January 15, 2023 and will last approximately an hour and a half. It would be very strong emotionally, probably taking up the mythical introduction of the 2013 game…
