A new director has entered the production for HBO's series adaptation of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us. The pilot episode originally had Chernobyl's Johan Renck attached as director, but Renck has departed the project due to an unspecified scheduling conflict.
Instead, TLOU's pilot is now in the hands of Kantemir Balagov, a young Russian filmmaker who won the 2019 Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for his feature film Beanpole. His work on The Last of Us appears to be his first work for hire, and his first project outside of Russia.
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Beanpole is a bleak period piece set in post-WWII Leningrad, about the bizarre relationship between two women who barely managed to survive the war. Balagov's involvement with The Last of Us, which has been warmly endorsed by Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann, is indicative that either Balagov is going to dramatically depart from his previous work, or the HBO series is being set up as particularly bleak. Nobody was expecting a TLOU adaptation to be the feel-good hit of the year, especially after TLOU2, but going out and hiring award-winning Russian filmmakers sends a very clear thematic message.
According to series co-creator and executive producer Craig Mazin (Chernobyl), the HBO series is meant to expand on the events of the original The Last of Us. Mazin is working on the show alongside Druckmann himself, so this is the rare case where one of a game's original creators is involved with the production of an adaptation.
The show is set to retell the story of the first game, tracking Joel's attempts to smuggle a 14-year-old Ellie most of the way across the post-apocalyptic United States. According to a widely-spread quote from Mazin, "I'm doing it with the guy who did it, and so the changes that we're making are designed to fill things out and expand, not to undo, but rather to enhance."
Mazin and Druckmann are executive producers on HBO's The Last Of Us, alongside Carolyn Strauss, Naughty Dog president Evan Wells, and Asad Qizilbash and Carter Swan at PlayStation Productions. TLOU is presumably one of the seven TV shows based on Sony's first-party game franchises that are currently under development; the other known work from this project is the forthcoming Uncharted movie, starring Tom Holland as a young Nathan Drake.
No word has been given yet on casting or other information regarding HBO's The Last of Us, but the show is still widely reported as being intended for a debut sometime this year.
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Source: GamesRadar
