Craig Mazin, the Chernobyl writer who’s working on The Last of Us HBO series alongside Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, has revealed that the show will feature moments left out of the original game. While he didn’t disclose which moments those will be, of course, Mazin mentioned that fans will “jaw drop” when they watch them in the series, which currently doesn’t have a release date but ships as soon as it’s ready.
“Jaw drop – that’s going in,” he said about how he reacted when Druckmann, the franchise creator, told him about certain scenes that didn’t make the cut for the game but would love to introduce them into the series.
“For sure, we have to do that. You couldn’t stop me doing that. You will have to shoot me [to stop me] from doing that. And there were a few things like that,” Mazin reminded telling Naughty Dog’s Vice President.
According to Craig Mazin, the series is still in the writing phase, but has the team already set on things that have to be done to avoid alienating fans of the game. One of those things will be music scored by the original composer Gustavo Santaolalla.
“If you have played the game, our intention is that you will watch the show and say ‘this has violated nothing of what I loved about the game, and what I witnessed in the game, but it has also brought me a whole lot more – things I did not know, really amazing things,'” Mazin said about that.
They are “creating new [things] and re-imagining what is already there to present it for a different format,” but this doesn’t mean that there will be episodes where things like Ellie and Joel jump on motorcycles and get into a fight against a gang.
Instead, the TV show format is something Mazin feels it suits better on the identity of the game, which is based on relationships, and those take more time than a movie – the previous The Last of Us adaption project – to develop and get to the level they would reach in a video game.
The Last of Us has achieved an even stronger popularity thanks to the commercial success of its follow up, The Last of Us Part II, but the TV show will be based on the story of the original game, where Ellie is just a kid and travels alongside smuggler Joel across the United States.
The full interview released at BBC is available here as part of the Must Watch podcast, which was originally focused on Chernobyl.
