HBO’s The Last of Us TV show season 1 is set to follow the original video game story, but beyond that there is scope for the TV show to do much more.
With HBO’s The Last of Us, the video game adaptation might be able to fully explore The Last of Us Part 2’s setup of a wider world by utilizing spinoffs to create a full franchise. The Last of US television show has been a long time coming having been born out of an originally planned movie that got lost in development hell. The series will star Pedro Pascal as Joel Miller (voiced by Troy Baker in the games) and Bella Ramsey as Ellie (Ashley Johnson in the games).
HBO’s The Last of Us TV show season 1 will follow the events of the first video game. This sees Joel tasked with transporting Ellie across a future United States where infected zombie-like creatures pose a threat, but so do the other groups of survivors. In the sequel, The Last of Us Part 2, Joel’s past catches up with him and Ellie goes on a mission of revenge while a new character, Abby (Laura Bailey), is introduced and her story is explored in detail.
Throughout the first The Last of Us game, there is a sense that there is a wider world that continues on around the protagonist and that Joel and Ellie are merely passing through it. This is developed further with The Last of Us Part 2 as more factions are shown alongside the Fireflies with the Wolves, Scars, and Rattlers being introduced. They are all shown to interact in ways completely separate from the main characters with even Abby only being tangentially related to the central storyline of the Wolves, which largely happens off-screen. At the end of The Last of Us Part 2, it is hinted that the Fireflies are still out there in some form, and Abby and Ellie are both continuing completely separate disparate stories by themselves. All of this sets up the idea of a wider world, and while it might be explored in a third The Last of Us game, there is room for the TV series to expand into spinoffs, prequels, and other events set after The Last of Us Part 2 once HBO’s upcoming show has finished retelling the games.
Although some prequel information has already been filled in by The Last of Us DLC, Left Behind, and the graphic novel The Last of Us: American Dreams, there is still room for more. As Ellie has already been cast in season 1 and Abby will presumably appear in The Last of Us season 2, the show continuing with their stories, perhaps alongside a The Last of Us 3 release would make sense. However, a spinoff series directly about the history and continued existence of the Fireflies could see a lot of success and fill in some important gaps. There are 20 years of unaccounted-for history between the start of the outbreak and Joel and Ellie’s journey beginning, so there is also plenty of room for an origin TV show.
While the idea of a wider The Last of Us TV franchise might seem grandiose, there is already precedent for it being well received. Fans of the video games, widely seen as modern masterpieces, are often hungry for more, and The Walking Dead as a graphic-novel-based franchise has already paved the way. After the initial success of The Walking Dead, the west coast spinoff Fear The Walking Dead started and The Walking Dead: World Beyond ran for two successful seasons, with each series expanding the franchise’s wider world and more content on the way. The Last of Us can follow this model but offers a different and more compelling zombie-based concept as the lore behind how the cordyceps function is more fully fleshed out and should be capable of supporting a larger The Last of Us franchise.
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