HBO
Speaking to John Wick: Chapter 4 director Chad Stahelski last week, he told us — while speaking about the video game movies he has in development, such as Ghost of Tsushima and Rainbox Six — that The Last of Us had “lifted the curse” on video game adaptions.
“We have a lot of push on that and a lot of interest because Last of Us pushing that, yes, the curse of video game-to-movie is kind of lifted. It can be done. You’ve just got to give it love and attention,” Stahelski told BroBible’s Post-Credit Podcast.
That attention to detail that Stahelski is referring to was obvious from the moment the series began with its endlessly chilling cold open that featured a late 1960s talk show discussing the dangers of the Cordyceps fungus, which would ultimately be the harbinger of the apocalypse.
“It’s real — it’s real to the extent that everything he says that fungus do, they do,” showrunner Craig Mazin told The Hollywood Reporter during a recent interview.
“And they currently do it and have been doing it forever. There are some remarkable documentaries that you can watch that are quite terrifying. Now his warning — what if they evolve and get into us? — from a purely scientific point of view, would they do exactly to us what they do to ants? I don’t think so. I doubt it. On the other hand, he’s right — LSD and psilocybin do come from fungus. What I told John [Hannah] was, ‘What we’re doing in this scene is telling people this has always been here.’”
While HBO has already renewed The Last of Us for a second season, series star Bella Ramsey seems to think that the next batch of episodes won’t premiere until either late 2024 or even 2025 based on her recent comments.
All nine episodes of The Last of Us season one are now streaming on HBO Max.