‘The Last of Us’: Neil Druckmann Explains Why the Movie Sam Raimi Would Have Directed Was Cancelled

‘The Last of Us’ arrives on HBO Max on January 16th. Naughty Dog and Sony’s popular post-apocalyptic video game becomes a series from Neil Druckmann, one of its chief managers, and Craig Mazin, creator of the acclaimed mini-series ‘Chernobyl’, also on HBO. The series stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey as Joel and Ellie, and is the prestigious chain’s biggest bet for this year, a big-budget blockbuster in which they have put all their trust. However, in another timeline, the adaptation of “The Last of Us” would have looked very different.

The project dates back to 2014, shortly after the video game went on sale and became a phenomenon. Around that time, Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Sony Pictures, began preparations to adapt the game into a feature film for theaters, with the intention of making “a very specific kind of film”. The studio, responsible for the hit franchise “Resident Evil” starring Milla Jovovich, worked with Druckmann to get the project off the ground, hiring Sam Raimi (“Infernal Possession,” “Spider-Man”) to direct. However, it didn’t go well and the film was cancelled. Now, Druckman explains in a new profile for The New Yorker on the new HBO series exactly what happened.

Druckmann assures that the problem was not Raimi, but the studio executives. Although he trusted the director’s vision, the company wanted to take the adaptation in another direction. According to Druckmann, Screen Gems kept telling them they had to make the movie. “Bigger and Sexier”. In other words, its aesthetic and narrative reference was ‘No Country for Old Men’ by the Coen brothers, while the studio wanted to make ‘World War Z’. Added to all this is another big problem: the difficulty of condensing 15 hours of gameplay into a two-hour movie.

For all of this, ‘The Last of Us’ movie ended up being put on hiatus, and after years in limbo, Screen Gems sold the rights to it. After a tense search that brought him into confrontation with PlayStation intellectual property expansion executive Carter Swan, Druckmann admitted that the game could not be adapted as a film. It was then that Swan told him that Craig Mazin, who had just won critical acclaim and awards with ‘Chernobyl’, felt the same way., which led to him meeting to discuss the adaptation. The two thus formed an entirely sympathetic tandem on how to adapt ‘The Last of Us’ into a series, with the freedom for HBO to write it as they felt best to do it justice. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The key to a good fit

The curse of video game adaptations has been hanging over Hollywood for years. While there are live-action based on popular properties like ‘Resident Evil’ or ‘Sonic’ that have been box office hits, most adaptations tend to be seen as failures. With ‘The Last of Us’, Druckmann, Mazin and HBO set out to break that curse by making the best possible video game adaptation..

The key to achieving it? According to Druckmann, who is producer, writer and director of the series, find a way to do it “to enlighten an audience that is passionate about stories, but hasn’t yet realized how amazing those that take place in video games are”. That is, to attract with the series, not only fans of the game, but also viewers who have never played “The Last of Us” and are unaware of the intense wonders hidden in the exciting story of Joel and Ellie.

‘The Last of Us’ will premiere January 16 on HBO Max with an 85-minute first episode.