Ahead of the highly anticipated season premiere of The Last of Us on HBO, certain big questions continue to swirl around anxious fans, mainly in terms of how the cast will carry the significant weight of the characters they’re playing and especially how the directors choose to play out the story as a whole. Thankfully, per a report from IndieWire, co-creators Neil Druckmann and Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin have assured audiences that they will stay fiercely loyal to the source content and not stray into any original, off-base ideas.
Druckmann, current co-president of game developer Naughty Dog who also worked heavily on the original games, clarified that, despite recent, very-much-still rumors of a possible third installment in The Last of Us game franchise, they absolutely would not be deviating anywhere outside the narrative scope of the first two released games.
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By this, Druckmann refers to the deep creative conflicts that arose at a certain point with HBO’s benchmark fantasy show, Game of Thrones. By the time the fifth season of the show was due, author George R.R. Martin had yet to finish the next book in the series (and still hasn’t), and show directors David Benioff, and D.B. Weiss took it upon themselves to orchestrate the rest of the story, for better or worse. Unfortunately, Martin disclosed that rather than at least include him in that creative process, Benioff and Weiss cut him out entirely from every subsequent season until the end. This inevitably led to one of the most controversial endings in television history, with massive outcries from fans everywhere. Druckmann and Mazin clearly don’t want to follow that same path of mistakes and will not endeavor to add anything original to their source material.
“We have no plans to tell any stories beyond adapting the games…We won’t run into the same issue as ‘Game of Thrones’ since ‘Part II’ [of the game series] doesn’t end on a cliffhanger."
How The Last of Us Will Play Out Its Story on Screen
With their pledge to stick to cemented material, Druckmann and Mazin have also noted that the show is currently slated for only two seasons, with the first one intended to cover the entirety of the first game and the second season to cover all of the second game. With an ever-growing whirlwind of strong opinions from fans on how the story as a whole can best play out, some will agree that sticking to a strict and succinct two seasons is the best idea, while others may lament that there won’t be enough time allotted for careful character development and world exploration in a story held so close to so many hearts. However, Druckmann has also assured that their project will focus heavily on the story between each character and keep the experience very much on the human side rather than in the direction of an action, monster-filled blockbuster like the Resident Evil movie series.
The first season of The Last of Us is set to premiere on HBO and HBO Max on Jan. 15 at 8 PM CST.
