We’ve seen a bit of a boom lately regarding films and television series being adapted from video game source material. It’s not necessarily new, but we’re seeing more success lately. A good reason for some of these successes is that the source material is not trying to be crammed into a movie. That’s precisely what was going to happen to The Last of Us before HBO picked up a television series.
Recently, Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann recently appeared in an interview featuring rapper Logic. Thanks to Gamespot, we’re finding out that the conversation had touched on The Last of Us adaptations. While fans have taken up with the series on HBO, it seems that there was a real possibility that the fan base would have been in for a real disappointment.
That comes from the initial idea being an adaptation made for a feature-length film. The problem here is that Neil Druckmann confirmed that, at most, the film would be two hours long. Because of the runtime constraints, several changes and clips were drastically cut down to tell the storyline in the amount of time given.
Neil admits that if the movie adaptation proceeded, it would have been one of those bad adaptations. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, as the movie was changed into a television series. That gave the team ample amount of time to not only tell the storyline for the first game fully but also make some expansions.
The result was a success, and we already have a second season in the works. While we didn’t get the second season in time for a debut this year, it’s set for a launch in 2025. The second season is being filmed right now, and that should tell a good portion of the second game, The Last of Us Part II.
Fortunately, that should mean we will at least get a third season of the show if this second season doesn’t end up becoming a flop. As for the video games, we know that a third-chapter concept has been established. Just how long we are from this third game from hitting the marketplace is unknown. The game in production at Naughty Dog has been kept under wraps, so we’re likely rather far off from The Last of Us Part III coming out if the game ends up being tossed into production.
