If Hollywood has taught us anything in recent decades, it’s that adapting an acclaimed video game into a truly great movie or series is no easy feat. But, few games are on the level of The Last Of Us – and going by the full trailer for HBO’s adaptation of the supremely-accoladed Naughty Dog duology of post-apocalyptic drama-thrillers, we might just have our first game-to-screen translation that actually does its source material justice. From Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin and the game’s creator Neil Druckmann, The Last Of Us series casts Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie – trying to make their way across an America ravaged by a spore outbreak that turns the infected into nightmarish coral-zombies. Watch the trailer here:
Look, hype can be a dangerous thing – and many game adaptations have begun with the best intentions and not turned out as you’d hope. But be honest: this is an incredible trailer, which promises what could be a very special show. The overgrown city visuals look incredible, the characters perfectly realised, and the clicking, creaking, clawing infected genuinely scary – a perfect blend of intimate character focus and epic production values. While we’ve had a fair amount of apocalyptic screen fiction of late (plus, well, some pretty apocalyptic real-life scenarios too), this looks to have a soulful, Western flavour to offset all the terror and gloom. And if anyone knows how to make a great show about a stoic father-figure who becomes the sole protector and guardian of a young ward who isn’t technically his child, it’s Pedro ‘The Mandalorian’ Pascal. Whether or not Ellie has Force-powers or a predilection for blue macarons in this one is yet TBC.
The good news, then, is that The Last Of Us has surely just shot up everybody’s must-watch list, and puts even more faith in the prospect that Mazin and Druckmann might have got it just right. The bad news? We won’t find out for sure until 2023, when the series will arrive on HBO in the US, and on Sky in the UK – exactly when is to be announced. In the meantime, we'll be going back to the recent PS5 remake of the original classic game for our fix.