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The Last of Us
2023 · TV series · 2 seasons
Created by Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin
Twenty years after modern civilization has been destroyed, Joel, a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle Ellie, a 14-year-old girl, out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal, heartbreaking journey, as they both must traverse the United States and depend on each other for survival.
22 positive4 negative1 mixed29 neutralfrom 56 commenters
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62 comments on Hacker News
Much of the VFX and CGI industry is already in India.
Movies and shows like Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Tenet, Dune 1&2, Odyssey, Chernobyl, Foundation, and The Last of Us were VFXed in large part by Indian companies like Prime Focus, Makuta, Phanton, and their subsidiaries.
A number of these overlap with HPC and Distributed Systems with a number of major players in the space coming out of the GPU design space like Raja Koduri (AMD, Apple, Intel). Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, and others having dedicated GPU design teams in India since the early 2000s also helped.
Reminds me of the TV Series "The Last of us" [0], which: "... is set decades after the collapse of society caused by a mass fungal infection that transforms its hosts into zombie-like creatures". Of course, minus the zombies.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_(TV_series)
My backlog is crazy long. As much as I love TV I don't get nearly as much time to watch it as I'd like.
* Andor * Black Rabbit * Dune * Last of Us * Percy Mason * The Paper * Pluribus * Severance * The Studio * Succession * White Lotus
Of all those, Andor was the biggest surprise. I'm a mild Star Wars fan (I've seen the movies and that's about it) but I really enjoyed this, probably more than the movies. It looked amazing, was well written and acted. It's a prequel to one of the movies and we watched the movie right after we finished the series and I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I did the first time I saw it.
The Paper and The Studio are comedies and watching them made me miss the great sitcoms of the past. Why aren't there more comedies?
I liked the Last of Us game and I think that's a big part of why I enjoyed the tv show. If you haven't played the game or aren't a zombie person, you could probably skip that one.
I liked The Peripheral but it was canceled so I have a hard time recommending it. What they made was very good but there just isn't enough of it. The William Gibson book it's based on is worth reading IMHO.
> If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it
To the contrary, the rest of the movie can be great. I'm not going to skip a movie entirely just because a couple of sections could have been a lot tighter, that would be silly.
> Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?
Not a movie, but I found myself doing it a huge amount across both seasons of The Last of Us. It's a great show, but I watch it for the personal relationships and stories and imaginative element. The "haunted house" parts feel like switching from a fascinating TV show to an amusement park ride, which has no interest for me. After 15 seconds of it, I've already got the tension and mood. I don't need 5 more minutes of it. It's incredibly repetitive.
But that's just me -- I'm sure there are other people who watch it for the suspense and zombies, and get bored when the personal relationship parts go on for too long. I'm not judging or even saying that the haunted-house suspense parts are bad, just that they don't have much interest for me.
Warner Bros has had their best summer in years (Sinners, Superman, etc). HBO still makes highly regarded prestige TV series (The Last Of Us, Task, etc). This is just false.
A couple of months ago I started listening to the Scriptnotes podcast, by Craig Mazin (showrunner for Chernobyl and Last of Us, also wrote for Scary Movie and Hangover sequels) and John August (Go, Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, etc.). They discussed receiving notes like that from executives on their scripts- that there needed to be a line of dialog here to explain, rather than just using the visual to explain, so that someone on their phone could follow along.
There are, of course, ways that writers and directors get to ignore executive feedback, have a bunch of recent hits already is one, do your movie outside the studio system is another, have it in your contract because you gave up some money or whatever is a third. This is why some movies are still made in older ways, but from what they said that feedback is pretty universal now.
Related but filming locations for season one of the last of us: https://www.travelalberta.com/articles/explore-alberta-locations-in-hbos-the-last-of-us
Not quite on topic, but I really value it when the film is shot in the place where it is set. The first episode of The Last of Us took place in Texas, but since it wasn't shot on location the trees were all wrong. Same thing with X. The article mentions films that take place in LA but are not shot there. What a waste.
I think most platforms have recognised this and now release an episode per week to get that common cultural experience back. I great plenty of discussion about last night's episode of white lotus or last of us.
I wouldn't be getting to nostalgic about the old days of tv. Remember how it was to miss am episode and have to wait for the repeat? Or be sick in bed for days and bored with literally nothing to watch/binge?
The problem seems to be creativity when there is limited information available. In these cases ChatGPT seems to do a good job, but Gemini just makes shit up even if you turn the "temperature" (creativity) down to 0.
Every so often I ask it for info about a previous employer of mine, and it randomly makes up hilarious "facts", like we made ultra low budget porn and horror movies, that we were a music recording studio, or that we were responsible for "the last of us" video game.
Yes, the game and TV show The Last of Us made cordyceps a fairly well known genus
My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the quality of shows in those services, they at least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
Echoing dagmx, I use mine constantly for movies and TV. Binged Fallout in 2 days — I’ve never done that before. Just watched ep5 of The Last Of Us 30 minutes ago. And so many movies, after watching probably <10 movies a year prior.
Well I mean technically almost anything "could" happen.
But a guy promoting his book, and a lazy journalist at the Guardian mixing in some images from the zombie tv show "the last of us" does not an article make.
cordyceps ant zombie fungus which inspired "last of us" tv series
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/w1ibC4lf4Dw
Craig Mazin who developed Chernobyl is also the showrunner for The Last of Us - season 2 is out next year. He'd be perfect for an East Germany based spy series with a tone similar to Chernobyl combined with The Lives of Others
> I want escapism
I mean going by the highest grossing movies of the year you got plenty to choose from. Other than barbie (which I would argue is not super deep in terms of politics anyway) the rest are all escapism: Super Mario Bros, Fast and furios 10, guardians of the galaxy 3, spiderverse 2, mission impossible, quantumania, little mermaid and elemental are all extremely light in terms of politics.
The three movies with "heaviest" political message are oppenheimer, barbie and even then in case of oppie the message is "mcarthyanism was paranoid and political engagement was stiffled as well as weaponised for personal and selfish goals" certainly not a super crazy political opinion that america's red scare went too far. And in terms of Barbie its mostly surface level "its not easy to be a woman" and capitalism takes advantage of people. But saying "self actualisation is hard with economic forces pushing against you, and some parts of the patriarchy have a compounding effect on women in terms of how difficult it is" is incredibly milktoast feminism even if its pushing the boundries in a movie that is essentially a toy ad that lasts 2 hours.
I don't know what kind of media you think does not allow Escapism and its so absolutely drenched in political content that is impossible to enjoy.
Most emmy noms went to Succession, a shakespearean tale of rich brats picking on each other for father approval and Last of Us, a zombie show about a father daughter found family that shows humans are the worst threat and not the zombies. Neither seems incredibly political.
Videogames this year, top of the crop were Baldur's gate 3, Zelda and Spiderman 2. One is a DnD campaign about power, world domination and brain washing aliens. Another is Ganon is back, you are the hero go make a car and kill him and the last one is Spiderman saves new york from the same guys he has fought since the 1960s.
What is this escapism that existed in the 90s that no longer exist and where is the political undercurrent in all mainstream media that makes it so hard to escape into?
Comic book movies seem to be dethroning themselves. Super Mario coincidentally being #2 at the box office would be the sort of tipping point for the studios to hungrily eye an alternate source of IP to adapt. (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2023/ - I will concede that FNAF is all the way at #18, which isn't very impressive).
I mean, they're already greenlighting nearly twenty Mattel based projects just because of Barbie (https://www.insider.com/all-upcoming-movies-mattel-toys-barbie-2023-7), it seems like Hollywood hasn't come a long way from the video's intro anecdote about how the original Batman movie ushered in a wave of adaptations of retro pulp heroes, rather than the more naturally lucrative choice of comic book adaptations. So who's to say they won't look at the similar success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and mine video game IP for adaptations?
At the same time, I think that other than for Daniel Kaluuya's 'A24-Type' Barney movie, most of the Mattel projects are not even going to see the light of day. It's a much more limited IP vein and once there's a box office bomb or two, the studios will quickly put the kibosh on the outlandish idea. Battleship, for instance, didn't exactly unleash a huge trend of board game movies.
Outside of the theaters, The Last of Us being a huge hit and a critical darling would seem to indicate that after decades, we might finally be seeing the end of the video game adaptation curse. The fact that there are any quality video game adaptations now, let alone successful ones, is itself a sea change. And as the video theorizes, maybe this isn't 2008 so much as it's the early '00s when the original X-Men and Spider-Man adaptations came out. A sign of the shift that is to come. But I firmly do believe it so to come. There are far more video games than there are Marvel/DC superhero properties. More genres, even.
I Hope it turns out well.
Generally I think Amazon does a good job with the prime original series.
I liked the Expanse. The peripheral was interesting. Even the LotR “rings of power” I found enjoyable, and maybe better than expected after those hobit movies.. Not perfect but it had heart, some humor, good music (Bear Mccready, Fiona apple!) thought a bit too sentimental as LOTR tends to be..
HBO took the “last of us” and did something decent I fall into hope springs eternal camp. But I’d rather play the story than just watch it… I loved the uncharted games, but am never going to see an uncharted movie.
In this case I watched my partner play fallout. It had a story, but you play you, not a specific character. But a settlement always needs your help.
Very interesting article but har to separate a lot of interesting facts from the very recently released show Last of Us. The opening of the first episode of the show talks about mammalian warmth keeping us safe from fungi which survive at much cooler temperatures. However global warming is selecting for warmer and warmer fungi it's hypothesized so we should be concerned for humanity. Interesting but also so tv plotish that it's hard to feel it's a bit silly. Do scientists really think a whole branch of organisms will adapt up over 10 degrees to greatly threaten humanity?
The streaming economy is shotgun malinvestment into the arts.
The subscriber pays a flat rate for unlimited choice within the catalog. They're not paying for the media they think they like the most. While technically the streamer is on the hook for this, they have competing optimization criteria - churn, hours viewed, etc.
The platform pours money into a lot of experiments. Platforms optimize for revenue and retention, get signals based on hours viewed, etc., yet none of this directly maps to satisfaction. Viewers will often mindlessly play stuff in the background. Expensive content reduces the number of cheap experiments that can be run. Weird stuff is long tail.
The old model of paying for what we think we'll enjoy was a better match that resulted in much higher quality film and prestige television.
I'd pay for House of the Dragon and The Last of Us. I'd probably pay $50 - $100 for each good TV show. I don't want the rest of it.
In my ideal world I pay creators directly with an upfront deposit. If I watch certain percentages of the show or film, they get a percentage of that deposit. I'd gladly pay a lot more for content this way.
New content should be paid for directly, à la carte. Old content should be streamed.
There is a reason most adaptations are terrible, for hollywood and tv producers it mostly a name/brand, nothing more. They most often don't bother reading/playing it, let alone making sure they like and/or understand it.
And books are not even the sorry chaps here they're actually much better treated than video games, there are a ton of "prime for massive tv/movie success" video games brand that have been ruined by people who clearly didn't know what they were about.
We got Halo AND Last of US at roughly the same time, both being massive brand from either side of the Microsoft/Sony, one (LoU) was done by the original game director and got beloved by fans of the games and newcomers, the other could not even respect one thing about its licence and then got surprised fans of the game hated it (Halo).
Do you have actual evidence for that?
Because sure, if you've got Property Brothers on in the background while you do other stuff, that makes sense. You can go in and out.
But if you're watching Squid Game, or The Last of Us, or Yellowjackets, or even Wednesday -- you'd better be paying attention to every frame. Modern dramatic TV demands your full attention in a way that The Golden Girls didn't.
The idea that younger generations are binge-watching Yellowjackets while browsing TikTok doesn't make any sense.
>> The article also noted that a minority of the viewers who started The Rings of Power, Amazon’s most expensive project ever, finished the series.
>It’s funny how something is so bad people won’t even watch it for free.
By contrast, ratings for The Last of Us on HBO rose steadily through every episode <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_(TV_series)#Ratings>.
As a counterpoint, look at the massive cross cultural success of the Last Of Us on HBO. My SO never played the games, nor heard of them, yet loved the show quite dearly, saying multiple times to anyone who would listen that its one of the best TV shows of all time she's ever seen, and it takes alot to get that kind of praise from her.
I played them in order of release.
The atomic bomb subplot seemed seemed laughably nonsensical in terms of the narrative and a mediocre example of a tragedy. The characters and relationships weren't built up to the point were it could produce the desired shocking effect in my opinion. They were just about to make an escape... and then what? Keep being random Marine bros, while everything else remains the same?
I recently watched The Last of Us, and I think the 5th episode is a stellar example of what I think makes up a good tragedy.
At the time I played the game, I didn't really pick up on the torture scene—not sure that was the never before seen, brave and shocking portrayal of the realities of the War on Terror that you remembered it as.
My problem with the plot was that it was logically incoherent, completely bonkers, and really ignorant of politics the middle east and Russia in that time period. I guess that's what happens if you don't have the benefit of hindsight.
Black ops was definitely more of a jingoistic Tom-Clancy-type epos, but it was great historical fiction with a narrative that was beautifully spun and made sense. It has a bit of Fight Club mixed with the Rambo movies and the Manchurian candidate. It plays on all the Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation, secret weapons programs, brain washing, sleeper agents, number stations, etc. and manages to create a great atmosphere. It ties in a bunch of famous places and events like the Bay of Pigs. Vorkuta Gulag, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Vietnam, the Rebirth Island chemical weapons facility and Kowloon walled city. The subtle hints and finally the revelation of the twist that Reznov is a figment of your imagination, a demon of revenge implanted into your psyche back in Vorkuta, are perfect. Your own comrades at the CIA are torturing you, because your they have realized you have been brainwashed after you kept sabotaging their attempts to stop the Soviet plan. It seems like you reveal the purpose of the numbers, because you remember the ship that acts as the transmitter, where you then kill Krevchenko, but his dying words reveal that the numbers were really part of the instructions to activate you as a sleeper agent to assassinate Kennedy. I found that ending incredibly satisfying.
> Nowadays the energy, ingenuity and talent that would have gone into making smaller films is instead going into making premium TV.
I hate this. I think 80-110 minutes is a good amount of time to tell a story. It's enough time to develop characters and build a world, but it's short enough that to be effective a film has to be ruthlessly edited.
Stories for TV are so bloated. Series like Stranger Things, Servant, The Last of Us and Russian Doll would have been perfectly suited to the movie format, but instead they get padded out to 8-hour seasons.
I should note I don't think this is true of all series, by any means. Lots of stories are well suited to the series format, like Succession, Dahmer or The Boys. And I know my opinion won't be a popular one because the runaway success of long bloated stories shows us which way the winds are blowing.
I'm not sure why you think HBO has gone downhill -- I wouldn't compare vice and HBO. One was supposed to be a news organization the other entertainment.
HBO is still banging out great TV shows. Last of Us is the most recent that comes to mind.
There have been many very good games made since N64 to be fair.
Command and Conquer series, Civilization series, Halo series, Zelda games, Pokemon games, Gran Turismo series, Metal gear solid series.
A huge number of creative game mechanics, graphical improvements, and deep rich lore and worlds to explore have been created in games. Some fantastic story driven games have been compared in artistic merit to Films and TV, and we're now seeing that acceptance with things like "The Last of Us" being turned into a hit show that was even almost scene-for-scene in the first episode.
Sure there a microtransactions and junk food style games for the lowest common denominator as cash grabs, but there are also deep, rich games made with love still.
I’ve been thinking the exact opposite. I recently finished Last of Us and Perry Mason (season 2) and am now in the middle of Beef and I think all three are great.
Have you seen the documentary that came this year, think it's called "Last Of Us" - fungus can turn humans into zombies :)
But yeah, fungus directly controlling ant muscles, while it's brain is helpless is quite terrifying. Also terrifying is the raise of fungus infections in humans recorded in hospitals in India and UK in the recent years. If they do adapt to living in a warm human body we will have a major problem - fungus are killing more trees, bugs and reptiles than viruses and bacteria combined, the air in our cities is full of their spores.
> every book, movie, TV show, video game and song fails to give me an interesting or meaningful experience
I'm curious, have you tried watching shows like Russian Doll? Andor? The Last of Us? The Leftovers?
These are shows that deal with the very deepest of human themes -- growth overcoming trauma, political radicalization, contradictory aspects of love, and finding meaning in life (respectively, for those four shows).
They're some of the most exciting and well-written pieces of art to come around in a long time. I can't imagine applying the term "grey slop" to those. And then after each episode, you can easily spend a couple of hours reading story analysis and criticism, listening to podcast analysis and so forth.
I can't help but wonder if you're not finding things like these that are actually pushing the envelope. Modern entertainment isn't stale at all, if you know where to look. (Obviously I'm not talking about the NBC reboot of the sitcom Night Court.)
(twawaaay) > > > Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens
(mike741) > > The video game??
(JPws_Prntr_Fngr) > I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!)
This article sums it up:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555/https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html#:~:text=Back%20to%20Disney%20movies.
Essentially, what has happened is the application of Disney movie/show narratives taken outside of their intended context: What was meant as the starting point for guiding children on morality has instead been used as the ultimate end-goal & a shining beacon of what is considered to be moral or immoral.
In simpler terms, this is the "Disney-ification" of the political world: We're the good ones, they're the enemy, they must be opposed/defeated/unalived.
From the article:
> In high-rung politics, it’s understood that people aren’t 1s and 0s—they’re all 0.5s, each in their own messy, complicated, unique way. And to people who see people as 0.5s, it’s clear that PDW narratives not only dehumanize their opponents, they dehumanize everybody into fake cartoon people.
> https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555im_/https://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/18-dehumanization-1-600x397.png
I was chatting about this with a friend as we were watching John Wick (2, I think)
Straight up 3rd person Shooter but as a movie.
And similarly, watching The Last of Us you can see how they broke down the screenplay into “levels” or “missions”. Maybe a bad example since it’s explicitly a video game crossover though.
> the culture that made those days happen
Literally one movie, that was an unexpected hit is your contender for better culture?
In 2001 the highest grossing movie was Harry potter, and right below lord of the rings was monsters inc and jurasic park.
In 2002 Lord of the rings, Harry potter, Spiderman
in 2003 lord of the rings, matrix,nemo and pirates of the caribean.
Like how is that any different to now when you have pirates, spiderman, some children disney movie and fantastic beats which is just more harry potter?
> the old skills are no longer there.
Dune had more practical effects than lord of the rings. In 2001 the TV golden age had not started. Shows like the sopranos and the wire where struggling to find an audience. Friends and CSI reigned. Nowadays House of the Dragon and Last of US two high quality shows, with good use of practical effects are doing better than comparable mediocre daytime tv.
Even blockbusters are in many ways better. Andor is a million times better than anything from the 2000s prequels.
Yes, climate change is the culprit for all ills, or at least that's what you read everywhere ;)
Climate change was mentioned on "The Last of Us" episode 1, at the start. Aside from fictional references, there are fungi that can grow outside of 70-90F up to 130-150F. I believe COVID and people rushing to the hospital emergency room for everything instead of going to their PMC may have had something to do with this fungus finding purchase to infect more people.
I literally just finished watching an episode of "The Last of Us" in a dark room, pulled up HN on my phone, and for a split second after reading this headline literally couldn't tell if I was in the reality of the show or actual reality.
That was kinda scary...
The rendering in the Avatar movies is at the cutting edge. But quite apart from the very uninteresting storytellying there's something there that just doesn't work for me visually - I don't know if it's the uncanny valley effect of the giant skinny blue people with giant eyes or what, but I'd definitely rather watching something creative and painterly like the Puss in Boots movie, or even something like the Last of Us with really well integrated CG visuals and VFX that aren't necessarily top of the line, but well integrated and support a good story.
I really don't know why and I don't really appreciate the attention to be honest.
The most recent one was some comments about The Last of Us TV show.
Torrenting without a VPN gets you a nasty letter pretty quickly. Someone at my IP address downloaded a single episode of The Last of Us with the VPN turned off, and I got an email that same day. No idea who would do such a horrible thing, but I think I saw some hacker-looking guy parked on the street stealing my wifi.
Isn’t The Last of Us currently one of the most popular shows on television right now? Its live viewership has continued to grow with each episode.
Episode 1: 0.588 million
Episode 7: 1.083 million
For comparison, House of the Dragon ended the season with 1.855 million.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/03/03/the-last-of-us-viewership-has-nearly-doubled-since-episode-1/
The ratings are also worth looking at: https://www.ratingraph.com/tv-shows/the-last-of-us-ratings-103573/
So I don’t think your assessment necessarily holds water.
> The Last of Us
I watched an episode and a half of that and gave up. Had enough of zombie movies. They're all the same.
It’s quite well done. Especially considering the track record of game to show conversions.[1] Vignettes from the apocalypse along with the story.
I watched someone play the game and this feels a little darker. Maybe because you aren’t playing through, just trying to survive. It has had a few moments of grace but gerenally is pretty dark. I wonder what the people that worked on think of their character and cut scenes ending up on HBO.
[1. on the media podcast about game adaptations, with transcript] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-last-us-and-curse-video-game-tv-shows
[can video games make great tv. New yorker] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/02/can-the-last-of-us-break-the-curse-of-bad-video-game-adaptations
It’s amazing how much work went into making it look like an abandoned 2003 arcade, even down to the team worrying about the color of the legs of a machine that might give it away as a more recent release. Then HBO stuff a Papermate Inkjoy RT pen in Sarah’s hand right in the first episode. The Inkjoy brand didn’t appear until around 2012 (and the retractable one was a little later). I’m assuming it was a product placement thing but it was quite in your face.
https://productplacementblog.com/tv-series/inkjoy-gel-pen-in-the-last-of-us-s01e01-when-youre-lost-in-the-darkness-2023/
The Last of Us being successful makes sense. It, like Naughty Dog's other big game Uncharted, was basically already a traditional movie-style story with interactive parts.
Uncharted is actually the best example of this. Its gameplay is super simplistic when you break it down, but it has a photorealistic dynamic cutscene layered on top which makes it fun.
It's just a top-quality zombie flick. Zombie films, just as any other good stories, have always been a vehicle to tell stories about the human condition.
This show does it really well. It has excellent writing, soundtrack, casting, set and makeup design. It's entertaining.
Like quality software, many quality stories don't seek to reinvent the wheel. The Last of Us is one of those stories.
Art today is definitely and absolutely still made with love and passion. Films like Everything Everywhere All At Once (or the recent episode of The Last Of Us) take a popular concept or franchise and make it their own. Fanfiction is still at crazy levels, thanks to websites like AO3. The book industry still has outstanding popular modern works which stand on their own and refuse to let genre define them. (Becky Chambers is my favourite for this, with her hygge scifi). There's also a whole host of internet culture - lots of tumblr tags and subreddits - that are actively filled with sharing, passion and community, not for good art that sells, but something that lifts the spirit in its own weird way.
Anecdotes aside, at least for independent artists it may be economical effects that constrain passion and make projects feel so for-profit. Which have always been a thing, unfortunately. Given technology, maybe there is so much art to consume that making art requires forgoing distraction and the general worry that the art will be bad (which is nonsense, because some art simply has a limited audience).
In today's era, stuff like EU art grants [0] can do some good, although I have the feeling that patronage-per-capita is considerably lower than it was in the past; it would be an interesting metric to look at and try best to increase.
[0]: https://culture.ec.europa.eu/funding/cultureu-funding-guide
The latest episode of HBO's "The Last of Us" shows a prepper with this freezer setup for a car battery
https://static1.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/the-last-of-us-battery.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=1500&dpr=1.5
Craig Mazin, the screenwriter of HBO's Chernobyl and the Last of Us series, once gave an awesome 45 minute lecture on his ScriptNotes podcast titled “How to write a movie,” in which he walks through how he thinks of storytelling and story structure. If you have any interest in storytelling or screenwriting, it’s a fabulous read. (You could argue that anything that smacks of formulaic storytelling should be avoided at all costs, but I think it’s still critically important to understand the basic tenets of strong storytelling structure. And as someone who enjoys both of Craig's HBO series, I would say he’s proven he knows how to tell a good story.)
Here’s a YouTube link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vSX-DROZuzY&feature=shares
You can also find it by searching for episode 403 of scriptnotes in whatever podcast app you use.
Yes, Star Wars seems to be a good fit. The first Harry Potter is also a good example of both "preconditions" being there.
Originally, when I was trying to think about stories, the following came to mind - Revenge movies like John Wick (the first one), and video games like The Last of Us 2, where the protagonist originally just wants to go about his affairs, but bad things happen to them and they want revenge. - "Catastrophe" movies like Alien, Predator, Terminator 2, where the protagonist needs to act to stay alive.
If you enjoy this, I highly recommend the podcast Craig Mazin (writer of Chernobyl and The Last of Us) made about structuring movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSX-DROZuzY
The simple answer is that while there are fewer people spending on games, those that do spend more.
The details are more complex because of the variety of ways games earn money.
The simple buy-the-game model can earn more because the cost of most games is more than going to see a movie
On the darker side there are games that unethically try and leech as much money out of the players as possible, sometimes to a life destroying degree.
In the middle ground there are games with pay-to-win, pay for quality-of-life, pay for bling, and pay for additional content. Different cultures and subcultures draw different lines as to what is considered acceptable.
There are also a few things that muddy the waters, How much is the revenue generated by The Last Of Us TV series considered game industry revenue? How about Angry Birds merch?
"A series based on “The Last of Us”, a post-apocalyptic game, seems to be a critical success. Sonic the Hedgehog was among last year’s biggest films and Mario is likely to be among this year’s. Nintendo is opening a new Mario theme park next month—in Hollywood, no less."
For a second, I just imagined how bad would be the Disney version of Mario or Rocky Balboa. Disney is one company that probably few of us were going to miss if they go broke... unfortunately.
The Last of Us just came out on HBO Max. One episode every Sunday until March. I'm thinking it's to prevent people like me from getting a subscription for a month, binging the one show I want to see, then canceling.
This resonates with me completely. I was an avid gamer in the first half of my life.
Then adulthood came and I just don't have time to enjoy games. I do watch a ton of TV shows and movies because they're easy to start up, put down, or even watch while doing something else that doesn't require full attention.
I do occasionally do a Let's Play of a game that looks promising, ideally one with little commentary, where the player focuses on the story elements rather than completion (prioritizes talking to characters over a speed run, or 100% quests completed, all collectables collected, etc).
Those are unfortunately hard to find (though I'd highly recommend the Cinematic Playthrough of Last of Us for anyone interested in experiencing the medium at its absolute best).
The nice thing about a Let's Play is that you get the story elements of the game, and can 2X speed through slow dialogue, skip action sequences as soon as they become monotonous, etc. You don't get to explore at your own whim unfortunately, but I've found it a good middle ground for being able to experience (and talk about) excellent games, while investing 10-20% the time actually playing it would take (not to mention it's free). It does tend to be more enjoyable with games that are fairly linear, rather than something like Fallout where there are thousands of ways to explore the game and align your character.
Other than that, I enjoy playing board games with friends.
That is truly terrible. Not just from a "think of the children" perspective, but also from a "this doesn't fit the lore or the tone of the source material in the slightest" perspective.
I get it. It's hard to adapt a silent protagonist. But did they have to overcompensate so badly and make him an obnoxious sounding pervert?
I was furious about what Paramount did to Halo when they recently made that into a TV series (partly also for including the sexual desires and activities of the main character that were not accurate or relevant). But you know what?... at least I wasn't a Zelda fan in 1989.
Sometimes tight control over IP is a good thing. That's what I remind myself every time I'm sad there's no Half-Life 3 -- it's a shame there isn't more, but on the other hand at least we're not suffering from two mediocre reboots and an awful unfaithful TV series complete with a gratuitous Alyx-Gordon sex scene.
I haven't watched the Last of Us series yet but perhaps, considering the success of that and Sonic, the tide is turning on awful videogame adaptations. They'll never stop being mostly awful, but perhaps they'll stop being entirely awful.
You are thinking about games the way Apple and Meta think about games - purely about the $$$.
It's this exact reason why they can't crack the market despite a large number of attempts.
"Cracking the market" for an art form like video-games isn't a matter of revenue, think of it more like tv, film or books.
The best games are made by the most talented developers, alongside the best game designers and directors targeting the most powerful consoles. These are the factors of making the best experience you can make in the video-game world.
You can't - I'd wager won't ever - find something like the Last of Us on a mobile, yet anyone who knows anything about gaming knows that is a game that will sell millions of consoles.
You play crap games on your phone for 5 minutes at a time because you can, but you go out and buy a console because you want to be immersed in the latest the art form has to offer because you want to.
A simple framing question; do you want to watch the new Top Gun on your 5 inch screen iPhone screen?
Exactly. Sure, Last of Us has the story of a generic zombie movie. But in a way, that was my twelve year old daughter I watched die. I don't think it's fair to criticize games for not having as good a story as a novel when you'd never imagine criticizing a music album for not having as good a story as a novel.
Hmm. I'm thinking that if there was a graphical video game based on the book "American Psycho" where one was playing that character, maybe it could be damaging to some.
I never saw such a game. -- The FPS games I've seen, I'd compare them more with looking at a ww2 movie.
"The last of us" -- that game maybe that one can cause, like you wrote, a bit desensitization. It's more realistic brutal violence in that game than what I saw in the games i played as a kid.
Any games come to your mind?
It's pretty funny actually, history is - it turns out - often more incredible than what you would consider a really bad plot point ("naaaaah c'mon that could never happen!"). And many organisms on Earth exceed even really poor middle-grade-school-level-b-movies.
As a favorite example, the cordyceps fungus which infect the host and affect the behavior of the host to more easily spread the fungus (eg climb higher before dying). Immortalized via BBC Planet Earth, and PE inspiring the game The Last of Us (filming as a series for HBO).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordyceps
Most zombie fiction is premised on a contagious pathogen or a botched scientific response to such a pathogen (28 Days Later, The Last of Us, I am Legend, Shaun of the Dead etc.) Some use accidental exposure to radiation or extraterrestrial contamination, with unclear mechanisms (Night of the Living Dead)
Zombie movies outside of the contagious pathogen paradigm are more uncommon. Some zombie movies, particularly the older ones predating Night of the Living Dead, are premised on religious supernatural voodoo stuff (White Zombie [1932!]). In others, the condition is not strictly contagious, but exposure to a chemical substance causes a reversal of death (Re-Animator, and Return of the Living Dead (my personal favorite and the origin of zombies who desire 'Braaaaiiiiiins')) In only a few, the creature[s] are created by a mad scientist deliberately trying to reverse death using something other than a contagious pathogen (Frankenstein (should that count?), and Re-Animator.)
Mad scientist in an academic setting attempting to reverse death and accidentally creating an outbreak of non-contagious zombies is a pretty narrow list of zombie movies. Re-Animator is the only one that comes to mind. Anyway, a zombie outbreak obviously isn't going to happen, but if the public becomes generally aware of this research, now might be a good time for Hollywood to reboot Re-Animator. Gods know they hate making original movies these days. I'm aware that a zombie movie fan complaining about a lack of originality may seem ironic.
ND still seems to be concerned with it. I did not personally play The Last Of Us, but it's cinematic nature (I did watch a movie recut) makes me feel like they put a lot of work into those aspects.