[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us, Season 1 Episode 1, “When You’re Lost in the Darkness.”] HBO’s new series The Last of Us has already premiered to the approval of fans of the video game and viewers who are new to the franchise. Though the thrilling story has just begun, the first episode has established the importance of the soundtrack in setting the mood for the post-apocalyptic world. Created by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (the latter also wrote and directed the video game), The Last of Us stars Pedro Pascal as grizzled survivor Joel and Bella Ramsey as a teenage girl named Ellie. Taking place after a fungal plague has ravaged the globe, it centers around Joel fulfilling his task of smuggling Ellie beyond a quarantine zo...
The Pitch: The video game adaptation remains an albatross around the neck of many a film and TV producer. For every Silent Hill, there’s a dozen or so Wing Commanders; TV’s no different, even as recently as last year’s weaksauce Halo series for Paramount+. But HBO hopes to break the mold with The Last of Us, their prestige-drama take on the acclaimed Naughty Dog game of the same name. If you’ve played that game, or its divisive sequel (or watched The Walking Dead or any other zombie media over the past few decades), the premise is pretty familiar: The world has been ravaged by a deadly plague that kills millions and turns them into flesh-eating monsters (covered in mutated Cordyceps fungus), and the desperate survivors scramble to stay alive and maintain their huma...
One of 2023’s first big premieres draws viewers into a dark alternate timeline of societal collapse and mold-infested zombies — a world that’s already quite familiar to video game enthusiasts, because they’ve played it. This is why The Last of Us executive producer Craig Mazin says that in adapting the award-winning video games for HBO, he and executive producer Neil Druckmann made sure that any changes they made during the adaptation process were “always purposeful.” “A lot of people, they go, ‘I want to adapt a thing.’ And someone says, ‘Great, you can.’ And then they’re like, ‘I’m changing all of it.’ And I’m like, ‘Well then why did you want to adapt it?’” Mazin tells Consequence during a roundtable interview. “Sometimes counterintuitively, I’m the one that’s saying, ‘You know wh...
The official trailer for HBO’s The Last of Us has been revealed, and the looming threat from the first look and teaser has finally clicked into place with an expanded preview of the zombie apocalypse video game adaptation. The clip begins with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, as lead characters Joel and Ellie, traversing across country on a mission connected to the younger passenger’s apparent immunity to a devastating zombie virus. Over a cinematic spin on a-ha’s “Take On Me,” the pair confront an army of the infected, who appear throughout the trailer in varying stages of transformation into the monstrous “clickers,” and also stumble into chance encounters with more survivors, played by the likes of an armed-and-dangerous Nick Offerman, Storm Reid, Murray Bartlett, and more. Pascal an...
HBO has revealed the first look at The Last of Us, its upcoming episodic series based on the popular video game franchise of the same name. Set for release in 2023, the 10-episode first season stars Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Gabriel Luna, and Nick Offerman. Released on PlayStation in 2013, The Last of Us is among the most critically acclaimed blockbusters in the history of the video game medium, with a Metacritic rating of 95 out of 100 and over 20 million units sold. It’s set 20 years after the zombie apocalypse, when the Infected roam freely and most survivors live in heavily policed militarized zones. One smuggler, a bereaved father named Joel (Pascal), is tasked with helping 14-year-old orphan Ellie (Ramsey) to reach a mysterious group called the Fireflies. While Ellie herself i...
HBO is reportedly shelling out big bucks to put some extra pop in its apocalypse. The Last of Us, the upcoming TV adaptation of the blockbuster video game of the same name, purportedly “well exceeds the eight figure per episode mark,” which would make it among the most expensive TV shows ever made. There are a couple of ways to judge the most expensive shows, but no matter how you slice it, you’ll probably land on three names. For a total series, the current record is thought to be held by the 73 episodes of Game of Thrones, which started off around $10 per episode and by the final season was costing over $15 million per pop — a pretty penny, considering there are much cheaper ways to piss off your fans. If you want to know the most spent on a per episode basis, then look no...