The upcoming live-action TV show adaptation of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us will have one major difference from the video game franchise when it arrives last year.
Ever since the show was announced almost two years ago, the showrunners have revealed that the HBO adaptation won’t be a direct live-action remake of the video game series.
However, fans were dealt with some major news recently when set photos from the show’s production revealed a major timeline difference.
The set photos from The Last of Us series showcase the year of the outbreak to be 2003 as it’s stated on a poster of the “19th Annual Biomedical Sciences Conference.”
The movie posters and set pieces on the show confirm this.
(Credit: u/hagilles) pic.twitter.com/LnKUMw5VNW
— NaughtyDogInfo | News (@NaughtyDogInfo) February 2, 2022
In the video game franchise, the dreaded Outbreak Day occurred on September 26, 2013 when the Cordyceps brain infection reached critical mass with the city of Austin, Texas being affected by it in the wee hours.
The story in the video game franchise then shifts to twenty years in the future to the Summer of 2033 where fans see the two protagonists in Joel and Ellie survive in a post-apocalyptic infected world.
It’s unclear why the showrunners decided to alter the timeline of the show, as it’s very likely that most of the story will now take place in 2023 where viewers will follow the life of Pedro Pascal’s Joel and Bella Ramsey’s Ellie.
joel won’t sing “future days” to ellie……… https://t.co/fPDtLn3Yxw pic.twitter.com/skqDxufawQ
— Natalie (@fentinatalie) February 1, 2022
Fans were pretty disappointed about this change as it causes the omission of a popular cutscene from the video game series in Joel singing Future Days for Ellie. This is because Pearl Jam released the tune in 2013, and by that time in the TV show, the world will become decimated.
It remains to be seen if the showrunners will ever explain this change, and fans hope to see a good reasoning for it when the show hits HBO at the end of 2022.
