It’s been a year and a half since Amazon announced that Westworld‘s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy were working on a Fallout series for Prime Video. The announcement touted a “substantial series commitment,” but there’s been little news on the video game adaptation.
Now, Variety reports that the series has found its showrunners—a major step forward. Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner will serve as co-showrunners, and Jonathan Nolan will direct the pilot episode.
Robertson-Dworet and Wagner are an interesting pair: She co-wrote Captain Marvel and Tomb Raider, and he’s been a producer and writer on comedy series including Portlandia and The Office. So we’ve got action chops and offbeat humor, which sounds about right.
The Fallout series of games began in 1997 and has continued through many sequels and spinoffs, the most recent of which is 2018’s Fallout 76, an online, open-world game. The original game focused on a vault dweller who needs to repair their underground home–and deal with a gang of mutants. The series is set in a future heavily influenced by post-war America in the 1950s and the fear of nuclear annihilation.
When the series was first announced, Variety said, “With their Amazon project, Nolan and Joy will look to bring ‘the harshness of the wasteland set against the previous generation’s utopian idea of a better world through nuclear energy,’ to the small screen. The project will look to retain the games’ ‘harsh tone,’ which making sure it is still ‘sprinkled with moments of ironic humor and B-movie-nuclear-fantasies’ which players of the epic franchise know and love.”
Fallout is one of several video game adaptation projects underway, including HBO’s The Last of Us, Paramount’s Halo, and the upcoming Uncharted film. It’s also just one of Nolan and Joy’s currently-in-the-works adaptations; they’re also producing an adaptation of William Gibson’s The Peripheral for Amazon.
There’s no word yet on when Fallout will begin production.
