Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of the Fallout franchise of video games is entering production this year, and its two lead writers have been named, according to reports in Deadline and Variety.
It was previously known that Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (who worked together on HBO’s Westworld) would be executive producers, and Variety and Deadline both report that Nolan will direct the first episode of the show.
But Nolan and Joy will not be the primary creative leads on the series. Rather, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner have been attached as showrunners.
Robertson-Dworet wrote the screenplays for the superhero movie Captain Marvel and the 2018 Tomb Raider film adaptation. She is also writing a future Star Trek film planned for release in 2023.
Wagner is best known as one of the main writers on the sketch comedy series Portlandia and for work on modern sitcoms like The Office, Silicon Valley, and Baskets.
Robertson-Dworet brings the science fiction and action/adventure credentials, and Wagner brings the comedy, covering two foundations of the Fallout franchise’s narrative style.
The series was first announced in July with Nolan and Joy attached, but there were few other details available. We still don’t know much about the series, but the selection of the above two as showrunners suggests that comedy and action will both be central.
For those unfamiliar, Fallout is a long-running video game franchise set in a post-apocalyptic alternate future where a cold war between China and the United States turns hot, leaving the world in a brutal nuclear winter with mutated creatures and violent bandits. Despite the grim setting, the series is known for its sense of humor as much as its darkness, with pop culture references, a 1950s aesthetic, heavy influences from pulp science fiction, and biting satire of American capitalism.
The series originated as a slow-paced, top-down role-playing game on the PC in the 1990s, but the intellectual property was later bought by game publisher Bethesda Softworks. Most recent installments have been made by Bethesda Game Studios, which is best known for the open-world adventure role-playing series The Elder Scrolls, and the recent Fallout games have more in common with those games than with the original Fallout titles from the ’90s.
The series has maintained a deep and consistent library of lore spanning hundreds of years throughout its run across its various games, giving the TV series’ writers a lot to draw upon.
Though the TV series begins production this year, we don’t yet know when it will start streaming to audiences.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1824477