A new director has entered the production forHBO’s series adaptation of Naughty Dog’sThe Last of Us.The pilot episode originally hadChernobyl’s Johan Renck attached as director, but Renck has departed the project due to an unspecified scheduling conflict.
Instead,TLOU’spilot is now in the hands of Kantemir Balagov, a young Russian filmmaker who won the 2019 Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for his feature filmBeanpole. His work onThe Last of Usappears to be his first work for hire, and his first project outside of Russia.
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Beanpoleis a bleak period piece set in post-WWII Leningrad, about the bizarre relationship between two women who barely managed to survive the war. Balagov’s involvement withThe Last of Us,which has been warmly endorsed by Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, is indicative that either Balagov is going todramaticallydepart from his previous work, or the HBO series isbeing set up as particularly bleak. Nobody was expecting aTLOUadaptation to be the feel-good hit of the year, especially afterTLOU2,but going out and hiring award-winning Russian filmmakers sends a very clear thematic message.
According to series co-creator and executive producer Craig Mazin (Chernobyl), the HBO series is meant to expand on the events of the originalThe Last of Us. Mazin is working on the show alongside Druckmann himself, so this is the rare case whereone of a game’s original creators is involvedwith the production of an adaptation.
The show is set toretell the story of the first game, tracking Joel’s attempts to smuggle a 14-year-old Ellie most of the way across the post-apocalyptic United States. According to a widely-spread quote from Mazin, “I’m doing it with the guy who did it, and so the changes that we’re making are designed tofill things out and expand, not to undo, but rather to enhance.”
Mazin and Druckmann are executiveproducers on HBO’sThe Last Of Us,alongside Carolyn Strauss, Naughty Dog president Evan Wells, and Asad Qizilbash and Carter Swan at PlayStation Productions.TLOUis presumably one of the seven TV shows based on Sony’s first-party game franchisesthat are currently under development; the other known work from this project is the forthcomingUnchartedmovie, starring Tom Holland as a young Nathan Drake.
No word has been given yet oncasting or other informationregarding HBO’sThe Last of Us,but the show is still widely reported as being intended for a debut sometime this year.
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