Before it became the critically acclaimed HBO series that has had a major impact on pop culture conversation over the past few weeks, the series adaptation of “The Last of Us” was conceived as a blockbuster film.
Shortly after the game came out a decade ago, Screen Gems attempted to adapt the property as a feature. The project never made it out of development though, famously having great difficulty shrinking the game’s expansive story to fit a feature narrative.
Jeffrey Pierce played Joel’s brother Tommy in the video game and has been on screen in the past two episodes of the HBO series as Perry, the right hand man to Kansas City rebel leader Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey).
Speaking to EW this week, he revealed he was also asked to read for the role of Tommy in the Screen Gems film back in the day as part of a secretive read-through of actors. He says that even if the film had been made, it wouldn’t have been able to live up to the game:
As good as it was, it was never gonna be a great movie. 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. So how would that become special?”
After the film adaptation fell apart, the game’s director Neil Druckmann eventually met “Chernobyl” creator/showrunner Craig Mazin and the rest became history as the pair developed the HBO adaptation:
“The second that I heard that Neil and Craig had lunch together – I had just watched Chernobyl in a hotel room in Vancouver or something and was floored by this historical event – I knew that the two of them were gonna make something just about perfect.”
The talk comes as the first episodes have started showing up on Nielsen streaming charts (which run about a month behind airings) with “The Last of Us” pulling in 837 million minutes viewed in its first full week of availability from January 16th-22nd and coming in 6th place.
Nielsen streaming measurements only account for viewing on HBO Max, so these numbers don’t reflect viewership on HBO’s linear channel. Even so, the series is already outpacing “House of the Dragon” at the same point in its run as it clocked up 741 million minutes viewed.
According to HBO, “The Last of Us” has reportedly averaged 21.3 million viewers per episode for its first two episodes. The sixth of the planned nine episode run airs tomorrow.
