On January 16, the series for The Last of Us will be released in Germany on WOW and Sky. The media interest in the adaptation of the Playstation classic is correspondingly high at the moment. But how expensive were the nine episodes that will be broadcast on HBO in America? An article in The New Yorker magazine recently shed light on this, in which Neil Druckmann, among others, spoke about previous video game adaptations. The series should cost more than, for example, the fifth season of the HBO series Game of Thrones.
Last of Us teurer als Game of Thrones
The website The Direct links to an article on the TV Guide website that breaks down the cost of GoT season 5. An episode cost between $6 million and $8 million to produce. Overall, the costs were therefore between 60 and 80 million US dollars. The Last of Us (buy now), however, should cost at least 90 million US dollars.
The Direct refers to a statement by Damian Petti, President of IATSE, a Canadian theater workers’ union. In July 2021, he said that the adaptation would cost over 10 million US dollars per episode. The New Yorker article justifies the enormous costs of the HBO series, among other things, with the depiction of the post-apocalyptic cities, which were once inspired by the book “The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman.
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No absurd costs?
To show that the cost of the Last of Us series is by no means astronomical, The Direct draws a comparison with the Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. After all, one episode cost about $58 million to produce. The total cost of the series is therefore around 465 million US dollars. Compared to that, the $90 million for the HBO series still seems relatively tame.
Quellen: The Direct, The New Yorker
