You may have heard the news that the highly acclaimed action-adventure video game “The Last of Us” will be having an live action adaptation as announced by the HBO in March. Working together with game developer Naughty Dog, the television adaptation will be based on the first events of the first game in which the smuggler Joel will have to escort the teenager Ellie across a post-apocalyptic United States and they will have to survive hostile humans and zombies which are humans infected by a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus. They will need to reach a group called the Fireflies.

To direct the pilot of the adaptation will be Johan Renk, who took charge of 5 episodes of the much praised television drama of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. He will be reunited with Craig Mazin, the creator of “Chernobyl” who has been with the project from the beginning and who will co-write and be executive producer together Neil Druckman who is the writer of the game and executive director.

The adaptation of “The Last of Us” is not a movie made for TV and is actually a TV series as confirmed by Renk and depending on the pilot, he might direct more episodes for the series as revealed in this interview with Discussing Film:

I’m an executive producer on it and attached to it. It’s an ongoing TV series. So that’s not something that I will be able to take on to that extent, but I’m part of that series and I will be directing at least the pilot. Then we’ll see how it goes on further. I mean, both Craig and I, we are working with each other again and we will work with each other on other things because we like each other.

This is not the first time that there will be an adaptation of the game. In 2014, Sony announced that there will be a film adaptation that was written by Druckmann and to be produced by Sam Raimi and that “Game of Thrones” star Maisie Williams (“Arya Stark”) was interested in playing the Ellie role. The project was stillborn due to disagreement between Druckman and Sony.

“The Last of Us” was first released in June 2013 and is playable only on the Sony Playstation series. A sequel, “The Last of Us Part II” will be released on June 19 after delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.