Sony Cancelled Animated The Last Of Us Movie
Some stories are just so epic, they need recreating in another medium. Whether it be James Bond, Harry Potter, Batman, or the Avengers, these IPs mean big business in Hollywood. However, adapting video games into anything other than average outings has been a struggle.
The likes of Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog led the way as live-action/animated hybrids trying to break the video game curse, while The Super Mario Bros. Movie looks like an animated adventure for the ages. Still, The Last of Us was almost an animated movie, too.
Was The Last Of Us Nearly An Animated Movie?
Click to enlargeWhen Naughty Dog released The Last of Us in 2013, it likely never realised it was creating one of the best video game stories of all time. Still, with the title reinventing the survival horror genre, it was no surprise it was quickly marked for the Tinsel Town treatment.
Around 2014, Resident Evil (movie) studio Screen Gems was working on a live-action The Last of Us with Evil Dead's Sam Raimi producing and Game Director Neil Druckman writing the script. However, have you ever heard about the animated movie pitch?
The Last of Us is currently breaking records over on HBO, with Game of Thrones alumni Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal playing Ellie and Joel for the live-action series. There are a host of other stars, with voice actor Jeffrey Pierce playing a new character called Perry instead of reprising his role as Tommy from 2013's game.
Speaking to EW, Pierce explained the various stages of adapting The Last of Us and why it repeatedly stalled. "As good as it was, it was never gonna be a great movie," he says about the first movie treatment.
"In a two-hour runtime, how are you gonna tell 14, 17 hours of story? Then I think that there was some conversation about it maybe being an animation motion-capture movie series at some point, and that seemed like a good idea, but we've been down that road."
HBO's The Last Of Us Was The Right Choice
As Pierce points out, the likes of himself Troy Baker (Joel) and Ashley Johnson (Ellie) did motion capture for their video game performances, saying, "So how would that become special?" Instead, he was blown away by watching showrunner Craig Mazin's work on Chernobyl.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Druckmann has previously said the movie fell apart because execs at Sony wanted "bigger and "sexier." While he imagined No Country for Old Men, they wanted World War Z.
By spreading the story of The Last of Us over nine episodes, we've been given a more intimate peek into the fungal apocalypse. Cramming this into a two-hour movie means we'd have missed whole arcs like Episode 3's epic Bill and Frank love story.
Naysayers have criticised some of the creative differences from the game, but apart from review bombing amidst allegations of homophobia, the fact The Last of Us is one of the highest-rated series of all time is already speaking for itself.
We've already seen Sony largely botch Naughty Dog's Uncharted with an underwhelming movie starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, but just imagine if it'd gotten the Mazin and Druckmann treatment over at HBO. Oh way, maybe in another life.
