
What does The Witcher, Halo, Max Payne, Bloodrayne, Resident Evil, House of the Dead, Assassin’s Creed, Street Fighter, and Prince of Persia all have in common? They are all popular video game franchises which were brought to the screen with mostly-disastrous results. In fact, only one of those adaptations saw any real, continued success even though it wildly diverged from the source material – the Resident Evil movies. However, HBO had the opposite problem. The Last of Us season 2 was based on a bad game and no one would have faulted the company for completely changing it from The Last of Us Part 2 for a number of reasons.
WARNING: COMPLETE SPOILERS FOR THE LAST OF US PART 2
Despite what a minority of gamers and Redditors might say, The Last of Us Part 2 (TLOU2) was a horrible sequel to The Last of Us because of the writing. In fact, in the history of bad sequels, TLOU2 would have a top spot in that list. It took one of the main components that made the first game resonant with gamers and dunked it in a vat of acid. Which is the relationship between Joel and Ellie. A relationship that was presented in a convoluted, jumbled way that is told in flashbacks and point-of-view changes after the brutal killing of Joel.
It’s not well done and it just makes a once-beloved character like Ellie into one that no one really cares about and is only going through the game just to see how it unfolds. Joel went from a competent, take-action, and knows-what-to-kind of man with experience to a more subdued and unsure character in order to “elevate” Ellie who is an ungrateful little twerp who hates Joel and complains about him saving her life and that she should have died to try and save humanity.
That Joel was a jerk for saving her and depriving her life of any meaning.
Meanwhile, you have the roided out character Abby who bashed in Joel’s head to avenge her father that purposefully murdered people to try and find a cure that players were forced to play from her perspective that the writers hoped would make her a sympathetic character. She is not. Nor is her gimped quest for the white whale in revenge for a hypocritical father who had no problem sacrificing the lives of others for the goal of saving humanity unless that sacrifice would have involved Abby.
And the showdown between Abby and Ellie is absolutely atrocious and solidifies the fact that most people no longer cared about either character at the end of the game (they don’t kill each other and walk away).
Suffice to say, TLOU2 is a horrendous narrative mess that did everything it could to make the main characters unlikable, unsympathetic, reprehensible, and hypocritical.
While it makes sense for The Last of Us to have a screen adaptation because it was an absolutely fantastic game. HBO still decided to make some fumbles both in the casting of Joel and Ellie, while adding unnecessary fluff to the show that distracted from its story.
Ellie saying she is going to be a dad is absolute peak for how ridiculous The Last of Us Season 2 is in how the show builds upon the game in ever-increasing levels of cringe.
HBO could have made the show better than the game when it comes to writing, but didn’t even try. pic.twitter.com/sdu8L0uths
— Sean D Knight (@SeanDKnight) May 7, 2025
Then HBO, bucking the Hollywood trend of ignoring the source material, decided to try and recreate The Last of Us 2 for the second season of the show. Meanwhile Netflix’s The Witcher ignored the source material for the sake of diversity and wokeness because the creatives behind the show think of themselves as grand crusaders of society who didn’t need to be faithful to a successful IP.
So why did HBO decide to adhere to the source material for the sequel of a successful game that was, itself, not well-received by the audience?
The answer is obvious, The Last of Us Part 2 not only hits the LGBTQ quota, but far surpasses it, so that the people working on the show didn’t have to do anything really. Except maybe improve on the writing and pace that the game completely blundered. Which is what tanked a potentially successful IP.
Yet, HBO didn’t do that. Instead, they decided to take things further than where the game went. To the point that they tweaked the scene of Ellie being told that Dina is pregnant and she laughably says, “I’m gonna be a dad.” Which is not how it went in the game.
It’s akin to making a Mass Effect TV show and staying true to the first two games, but then deciding to continue to stay true to Mass Effect 3 and not changing/fixing what was wrong with the ending that ticked off so many fans of the series, but taking it even further.
A major thing HBO needed to change was the timing of Joel’s death. HBO had the opportunity to make Joel’s death far more impactful without the nuclear aftermath by simply changing when it happened. His early, horrific death at the beginning of the game was one of the worst narrative choices that the developer, Naughty Dog, could have made. It turned Abby, an already unlikable and unsympathetic character, into a truly hated one. Ellie also became a disgusting character as flashbacks showed how she treated Joel.
Joel’s death is the main reason why TLOU2 was a blundering, narrative mess on a massive scale, and HBO’s tv series is not doing a good job of fixing the narrative issues and the results are there, especially in the aftermath of Joel’s death in episode 4. The Last of Us Season 2 is seeing a massive drop in viewership numbers and user ratings on Metacritic(3.9) and Rotten Tomatoes (46%).
But what do I know, right?
Why should HBO not stay true to the source material of a sequel that completely destroyed a promising and lucrative franchise and prevented it from having a trilogy? Sure, let this be the one time in Hollywood where a video game adaptation actually tries to adhere to the source material.
For a bad sequel.
I’m sure Naughty Dog was hoping that HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us would help them gain traction and support to develop Part 3. And, if I am correct in that assumption, they were completely delusional. Especially as HBO doubled down with season 2 of The Last of Us rather than acknowledge the issues with the writing. Which hurts Naughty Dog’s reputation even more since TLOU Director Neil Druckmann was one of the people involved in writing the show. And fan reactions are going to get worse as season 2 progresses.
Sorry Naughty Dog, The Last of Us Part 3 is not going to be a thing. You killed the goose that laid the golden egg and then, with HBO’s help, kept stomping on the corpse with The Last of Us Season 2.
Author’s Note:
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