The Last of Us movie?

As much as I like Maise Williams, I don't know how her American accent is, I don't think this movie itself is gonna get made. For every Resident Evil movie made, there's DOZENS of Kane and Lynchs that never make it into Pre-Production.

And even if it does get made, if Warcraft is any indication then Maise will be a grown woman with kids by the time this movie finally moves forward.

I hate this. I hate that people try to make films out of videogames. There's no decent liscence that has survived that transition in either direction.

I hope this falls through like that Uncharted movie, especially if Sam Raimi is involved. I mean fuck. They had something awesome and now they are actively trying to associate it with something that will inevitably be inferior for a cheap payout. Pathetic.

I agree this shouldn't really be a thing, but there are plenty of game properties that have had terrible movie adaptations and continued to release great games. Street Fighter survived several shitty movie adaptations and continues to go strong, same with Mortal Kombat. Tomb Raider also had two pretty awful movies, and while the series did have a bit of a lull for a few years, the best game in the series (the reboot) was released after those movies.

Oh, I'm not suggesting the poor films somehow diminish the quality of the games, but it's definitely not a classy move. Probably because it's so transparently moneygrabbing business types in suits going "That game was pretty good, how can we squeeze every last penny out of it?" It effectively makes the games, developers, and entire industry just look slightly less professional, and less likely to be taken seriously.

I'm also a total hypocrite, as I worked on one of the Resident Evil movies :D

@sweep:

What about animated movies, or OVAs or whatever? I know that there are some that have generally been successful with that, but as of right now, all I've got is Persona 3.

Maybe it's just the live action factor that fucks that up, at least a little?

I don't think it's about how they are interpreted, I think it's just that they don't understand what people want. You can't squeeze a 10 hour game into a 2 hour movie. You can't just wrench away control from the players and expect them to still be invested in the narrative. You either assume viewers know nothing and drown them in badly translated exposition, or you assume they already know everything, in which case you could argue there's no point in the first place.

I love The Last Of Us, but I honestly don't see why a film is needed. All I can see it doing is attempting to clone the cinematic nature of the game, which the game obviously already provides, so that's redundant. The only way I could be vaugely interested is if it was a spin-off, like that TV thing Halo is doing. The universe they have created is expansive enough to accomodate that. Unfortunately from the initial rumours it looks like it's going to be a live-action interpretation. From Sam Raimi no less, who has such a great track record of re-imagining other mediums as films. Eurgh.

I wonder if they even asked, considering all the legal issues with likenesses in the game. I can't decide whether giving her the first shot at the role would be seen as a mea culpa or an insult.

That goes for any adaptation, though. The Lord of the Rings trilogy are some of the best high fantasy movies every made, and they pay great respect to the source material as much as they reasonably can. But the realities of film being a different medium means that they have to cut corners and do their own thing at times. A lot of hardcore LOTR fans were annoyed that they left Tom Bombadil out of Fellowship of the Ring. But that character, as entertaining as he is, would be completely nonsensical in the films as he just shows up out of nowhere and saves the hobbits with apparent superpowers before vanishing from the story, never to be seen again.

It's not about not being able to squeeze a ten-hour game into a two-hour movie. It's about missing the factors that are important to the story and world. Super Mario Bros. was a disaster for a lot of reasons, but one of the key contributing factors to it being a disaster was that the filmmakers went off on a completely batshit direction in their interpretations of everything from Bowser being Dennis Hopper with an awful haircut to the fact that the Mushroom Kingdom looks like a low rent Blade Runner city. They couldn't even get Mario and Luigi's overalls right, of all things, putting them in colored jumpsuits as they leap around in rocket boots and use flamethrowers. I realize that Super Mario Bros. has a very simple story and world, and back when the film was made, a lot was left up to interpretation, but the game's are something much, much closer to a child's storybook fantasy than a dark sci-fi dystopia.

The same goes for Street Fighter. The best thing about that movie is Raul Julia's scene chewing performance, but as wonderfully goofy as that is, it doesn't save the fact that the film basically ignores every ounce of established characterization. Balrog's a good guy, Dhalsim is a genetics scientist working for Bison, Ryu and Ken are a couple of sham arms dealers, Zangief is both a bad guy and an imbecile, and the list goes on. Again, I understand that the Street Fighter storyline is pretty goofy (Psychopower, Satsui no Hadou, etc.), but it doesn't feel like the people behind the film even knew what they were adapting and just did their own thing, which while bad in its own right also failed to capture the majority of the characters in a way that fans of the games could recognize. Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, while not exactly cinematic gold itself, at least was able to portray the characters with more accuracy than a blind man throwing darts into the wind.

@hailinel:

Counter-point: Advent Children was pretty faithful to Final Fantasy VII (or at least what people remember of Final Fantasy VII), and that was still a controversial film. (I would have used that Chun-Li movie, but I don't know how faithful that is to the source material. I know that it gets some things right (Chun-Li being in Interpol, M. Bison being an asshole), but not much else.)

Advent Children isn't really controversial, though. It has its fans and its detractors, and a lot of that tends to follow along the lines of whether, in general, you like the expansions of the Final Fantasy VII story and world through that movie and the various other projects they produced at the same time. Is it a good movie? It's been too long since I've seen it to give it a fair analysis, though the extended cut they released later does improve things a lot.

Just because it hasn't been pulled off successfully yet, I don't really want to rule this out. It just takes people that understand the implications behind what they're doing.

I don't really see why this needs to a movie. The game does such a good job at setting up it's own universe and telling it's own story that a movie based on that game seems ultimately redundant at best. If this does turn out to be a thing that happens, I'm not sure how I feel about Maisie Williams playing Ellie. She's an incredible actor, but I dunno, maaaan...

Naughty Dog getting deep into that licensing money, yo!

I completely disagree with this sentiment. In fact, I think that often the medium of feature length films is the weakest format to tell stories in, especially when adapting other sources. Books, TV shows and video games have the luxury of almost infinite time, that is to say that they can be as long as the creator sees necessary. Movies often have to be compressed with a lot of material left on the cutting room floor in order to be able to conform to the two hour format of a feature length film. It's why George R.R Martin and the creators of the Game of Thrones chose to make a series on TV rather then turn A Song of Ice and Fire into movies. They said that it was sort of like having the choice to adapt the books into a series of 2 hour movies, or a season of 10 hour movies.

There's a lot of character development that happens in games while the player is controlling the character, and that is something that is usually lost in adaptions. They will take the key plot elements but strip out all the little details that made the adventure great simply because that is the reality of movies. Don't take this as me saying that there haven't been successful adaptions into film, because there obviously has been. But I sincerely think that it is one of the least impact full ways to tell a story.

I wouldn't call Advent Children a good film but I still really enjoy it. It has it's moments. You're right about the split and that pretty much extends to the entire FF fan base, with everything that involves. I don't think anything can ever be improved by extending or adding things though. That's not where I see quality in things personally.

@liquidprinceBooks, TV shows and video games have the luxury of almost infinite time, that is to say that they can be as long as the creator sees necessary. Movies often have to be compressed with a lot of material left on the cutting room floor in order to be able to conform to the two hour format of a feature length film.

This is why I love film. A simple story told well, captured perfectly within it's own boundaries. Nothing is better, but it applies to all mediums. Personally, I find the infinite run time of certain things to be to their detriment more often than not.

I'm going off topic but I do have a certain faith that The Last of Us has the potential to work as a film, considering it's a somewhat decent character drama and the gameplay is only really flavour. Most of the minute to minute action can be taken out and you'd still have some pretty intense set pieces. The action has to be about the characters relationships though and certain things would definitely need reworking. The financial district is a key moment between Ellie and Joel, but it's also intensely gameplay heavy and slowly paced if you manage to stealth it all, which also undermines the purpose of that scene but that's video games for you. Bill's fridge trap could be freakin' awesome on film though, shot well.

What about Blade Runner? Or Moby Dick? Or a video game I can't think of right now the DS version of Final Fantasy IV?

Setting aside the fact that Ellie only ever really looked like Ellen Page in the reveal trailer (not actually in the final game), Ellen Page is 12+ years too old for the role.

I hate the cynicism that comes with the film adaptations of anything beloved. If the movie's good, then hey maybe it'll get more people to play the game. If the movie isn't good, then we still have the game. It doesn't make the game any worse. Sure it may be the same story as the game, so it's kinda pointless to anyone who has played the game, but film is a much bigger medium than video games will ever be. This is just getting the story out to a bigger audience.

If this actually ends up happening, I'll see it. Hope it's good.

Additional content always feels false to me if it's not being used to rectify inconsistencies or allow for further streamlining. I don't mind changes being made, but they shouldn't be made to inflate, rather they should eek out the depth that was always there. I'm only loosely familiar with Blade Runner and don't the various cuts remove more than they add?

That didn't stop her before... ;)

It's obvious that blockbuster movies (or their advertising at least) reach a wider audience than major games do at the moment, but the idea that "film is a much bigger medium than video games will ever be" might be more shaky than you originally think.

Video Game sales have grossed more money than Movie ticket sales since 2009 and they've been widening the gap ever since. And this little factoid from the consumerist is pretty revealing about the selling power of AAA games versus the biggest movies

In the history of the American box office, there are 18 movies that have grossed $1 billion or higher. The fastest to do it was Avatar, which hit the 10-digit gross mark in a scant 17 days.

When Grand Theft Auto V launched last September, it reached $1 billion in sales in three days.

The idea that movies are the biggest cultural touchstone might not be true for very long.

I never understand why people get up in arms about movie adaptations. Maybe it will be great. And even if it sucks, who cares? The game will still be great. The Silent Hill movies were bad, but it doesn't make Silent Hill 2 any worse.

Also, I think Maisie Williams is a great choice for Ellie. Also, I'd vote Josh Brolin for Jole. Maybe that's the obvious choice, but I'd say there's a good reason for that.

Whenever I heard that a game is getting made into a film I can't help but be a little disappointed. Is our medium so bad at story telling that you need a movie adaptation? Granted, it's likely to get more money, but let's consider that money isn't the main driving force behind a game to movie project.

What's can a film adaptation provide to new audiences and The Last of Us fans that the game couldn't? Great narrative? Compelling characters? Great performances from actors? All of those things are already in the game. Games also aren't like books where it's easy to see how a film can enhance the story telling, or enhance the world created by the author. Games already have that and more, since they're interactive and involve those who are consuming the media more so than a film or book.

So while I do hope the project turns out great, I can't shake off how I feel above about movie adaptations of games. It's not as if The Last of Us is a game that fails to tell a compelling story with characters you can feel for either, in fact it's one of the best narrative driven games ever.

Just saw this photo of Jon Hamm and kinda almost got sold on him as Joel. I'm not entirely familiar with him as an actor though so maybe not, but still, look wise he can really pull it off.

Guy Pearce as Joel, look at that beard. LOOK AT IT!

@brucebonsai: If I jumped three years into the future and you told me that second picture was from a film adaptation of The Last of Us and it was Joel, I'd believe you. I have no idea what it's actually from.

I know I commented in here but I don't feel like finding what I said so I'll just say that I think The Last of Us would work much, much better as a TV show than as a film. Two hours, even three hours is just too short.

@sterling: .....If The Last of Us is an "interactive movie" then so are all other games that have gameplay broken up with cutscenes.

That's a lot of games.

You don't call a story driven movie a "watchable book."

@brucebonsai said:

Guy Pearce as Joel, look at that beard. LOOK AT IT!

That's not bad. We all know that Sam Raimi would probably end up casting someone completely innapropriate though.

Shia LaBeouf. Think about it.

Yeah, no one else I've heard suggested comes even close to being as good a match as Josh Brolin. He matches that character so well.

I'm not so sure about Maisie Williams. She's great as Arya, but I don't know that she really has that range that's needed. I wouldn't mind Chloë Grace Moretz for the part, she seems like she would be a great fit.

@believer258: The Guy Pierce movie is The Rover which may as well tell the story of what happened to Joel in the years between the start of TLOU and when he meets Eli

"10 years after a global economic collapse, a hardened loner pursues the men who stole his only possession, his car. Along the way, he captures one of the thieves' brother, and the duo form an uneasy bond during the dangerous journey."

It's a pretty good movie.

@believer258: I'd say honestly the best bet for this franchise getting the justice it deserves is by HBO mini series, 6-10 episodes. If I had to choose a show runner, it would be the team behind the "True Detective".

Daniel Day Lewis for Joel.

I voted for Hugh Jackman to play Joel in the movie on this site:
https://www.mycast.io/movies/the-last-of-us