Achievement unlocked: With nods for best drama series, actor (Pedro Pascal) and actress (Bella Ramsey), among others, HBO’s “The Last of Us” is the first live-action video game adaptation to earn major awards consideration from a top Hollywood awards body, in television or in film. “The Last of Us” earned a total of 24 nominations. (An “Inside the Episode” short about the show was also nominated.)
On TV, live-action video game adaptations are practically a brand new phenomenon, starting with “Halo” for Paramount+ and “Resident Evil” for Netflix, both of which debuted in 2022. That landscape is quickly expanding, with shows based on “Twisted metal” (for Peacock), and “God of War” and “Fallout” (for Amazon Prime Video) all on the immediate horizon.
Feature film adaptations of video games have been far more common, starting with the widely reviled “Super Mario Bros.” in 1993 —and the genre’s box office prospects and critical reception haven’t improved much in the ensuing years. Suffice to say, none of these movies, even the most successful, have come close to what any reasonable observer would call “awards worthy.” (Even the $1.3 billion–grossing “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” may still wind up without a ticket to the Oscars.)
“The Last of Us,” then, marks an extraordinary milestone —one might say a massive power-up— for the genre. based on the popular 2013 game for the Sony Playstation 3, the show tracks the story of Joel (Pascal), a self-serving smuggler, and Ellie (Ramsey), a headstrong teenager, as they navigate the zombie-infested American wilderness together. When it was released, the game was heralded for its deeply felt and nuanced storytelling, and that’s what the show’s creators chose to focus on, rather than recreate the game’s zombie-killing gameplay experience. (The show was produced in association with Sony Pictures Television Studios and PlayStation Productions.)
In an interview with PvNew in January, executive producer Neil Druckmann (who also created the game and its sequel) said that “one of the easiest decisions we made was to say, ‘Let’s strip all those out. Let’s only have as much violence in this story as is required and no more.’”
Executive producer Craig Mazin (“Chernobyl”) said that replicating the gameplay experience is “the mistake other people have made, I think, in adaptation [of video games], because they think that’s what connects people to a game.”
He added, “But ‘The Last of Us,’ more than any other video game I’ve ever played, connected me to character and relationship. And the relationship between Joel and Ellie was the thing that we wanted to pull through the most.”
Those efforts broke ratings records, averaging more than 30 million viewers per episode and garnering instant awards buzz for the series.
To be fair, this is not the first video game adaptation to earn awards attention. Netflix’s “Arcane,” based on the “League of Legends” game series, won the Emmy for best animated program in 2022 for its first season. And “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” — an interactive feature about game designers in the 1980s — won the Emmy for TV movie in 2019.
But “The Last of Us” has, by several orders of magnitude, exceeded the awards recognition of any other video game adaptation to date. The next question is if it can level up to a win.
