The HBO TV series version of The Last of Us will debut next month, but this wasn’t the first time the narrative of Joel and Ellie has been adapted. Previously, Evil Dead director Sam Raimi and game designer Neil Druckmann collaborated at Screen Gems to remake The Last of Us as a feature film. The movie had Raimi on board to produce it, and he and Druckmann co-wrote the script. Bruce Campbell and Maisie Williams, according to rumours, were considered for the lead parts.
Though it was rumoured in 2016 that the film fell out owing to “creative disputes,” the movie finally perished in development hell. Years would pass until Druckmann and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin decided to pursue a TV series adaptation instead, and it’s the series that we’re currently seeing at HBO. However, Druckmann commented on what went wrong with the intended film in a recent interview with the New Yorker, making it plain that Raimi was not the problem; rather, it was the studio executives.
Druckmann said that studio executives had repeatedly requested that some adaptational elements be “sexier” and larger. He said that the studio wanted the film to appear more like World War Z, although he had in mind something along the lines of No Country for Old Men as his “aesthetic reference.” Along with these issues, Druckmann also began to worry that a two-hour film wouldn’t be sufficient to accurately adapt the video game, which has 15 hours of gameplay. In any event, since Screen Gems cancelled the project, Druckmann had to start over and wasn’t put in touch with Mazin until PlayStation’s Carter Swan did so.
