‘Fallout’ TV Series In The Works At Amazon From ‘Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy
The ‘Fallout‘ franchise is making the leap from gaming to tv, as it’s announced Amazon Studios has licensed the rights to the games, with acclaimed producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Kilter Films attached to produce a tv series, which Amazon has already given a series commitment.
For those of you that don’t know the ‘Fallout’ franchise, the games are set in an alt-history post-apocalyptic world where large numbers of the human race survived by holding up by sealing themselves into underground bunkers known as “Vaults”. In the various games, you usually play as one of the “Vault Dwellers” who has left the Vault for the first time to explore life on the outside… which is generally filled with mutated monsters, rad-infected humans, and bottle caps are the main currency! It also seems that creators of the vaults, Vault-Tec, used some of these bunkers to conduct experiments on the occupants…
“Fallout is one of the greatest game series of all time. Each chapter of this insanely imaginative story has cost us countless hours we could have spent with family and friends,” commented Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. “So we’re incredibly excited to partner with Todd Howard and the rest of the brilliant lunatics at Bethesda to bring this massive, subversive, and darkly funny universe to life with Amazon Studios.”
Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are the brains behind HBO’s ‘Westworld’ which recently aired its third season and was has also been picked up for a fourth season. They are currently in pre-production on the techno-thriller drama ‘The Peripheral’, based on the William Gibson novel, which follows a woman in a near-future America in which technology has started to subtly alter society.
“Over the last decade, we looked at many ways to bring Fallout to the screen,” adds Todd Howard, Executive Producer at Bethesda Game Studios. “But it was clear from the moment I first spoke with Jonah and Lisa a few years ago, that they and the team at Kilter were the ones to do it right. We’re enormous fans of their work and couldn’t be more excited to work with them and Amazon Studios.”
The world of ‘Fallout’ is one where the future envisioned by Americans in the late 1940s explodes upon itself through a nuclear war in 2077. The magic of the Fallout world is the harshness of the wasteland set against the previous generation’s utopian idea of a better world through nuclear energy. It is serious and harsh in tone, yet sprinkled with moments of ironic humour and B-movie-nuclear-fantasies. It also has a very unique atompunk retrofuturistic style, influenced by the post-war culture of 1950s United States.
“Fallout is an iconic global franchise, with legions of fans worldwide and a rich, deeply compelling storyline that powers it. And Jonah and Lisa are the perfect storytellers to bring this series to life,” said Albert Cheng, COO and Co-Head of Television, Amazon Studios. “We’re thrilled to join with Bethesda to bring Fallout to television.”
The Fallout games have achieved record-setting sales and received hundreds of awards, including dozens of Game of the Year awards, while its mobile game, Fallout Shelter, has been downloaded more than 170 million times.
Fallout is from Amazon Studios and Kilter Films in association with Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks, with executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and Athena Wickham for Kilter Films, Todd Howard for Bethesda Game Studios, and James Altman for Bethesda Softworks.
