Series Adaptation of Video Game ‘Fallout’ in the Works at Amazon

One of the best selling video game franchise “Fallout” is getting developed into a series. The “Westworld” duo Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are creating this expansive sci-fi series for Amazon Studios.

The “Fallout” series, which began in 1997 with the original game, is set in a world where the future envisioned by Americans in the late 1940s explodes upon itself through a nuclear war in 2077. The game has a post-apocalyptic and retro-futuristic setting, taking place in the mid-22nd century decades after a global nuclear war in an alternate history timeline. The protagonist of Fallout is an unnamed inhabitant of a Vault, part of a network of long-term nuclear shelters, who is forced to venture out into the wastes to find a replacement Water Chip and save their fellow Vault inhabitants.

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.

The series hails from Amazon Studios and Kilter Films in association with the game producers Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks. Nolan and Lisa Joy, who signed a blockbuster overall deal with Amazon last year, will exec produce alongside Athena Wickham for Kilter Films, with Todd Howard as an EP for Bethesda Game Studios, and James Altman for Bethesda Softworks.

#PleaseStandBy. @Fallout @BethesdaStudios #KilterFilms pic.twitter.com/IEDr7AkVvD

— Amazon Studios (@AmazonStudios) July 2, 2020

“Fallout is one of the greatest game series of all time,” said Joy and Nolan. “Each chapter of this insanely imaginative story has cost us countless hours we could have spent with family and friends. 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.”

“Fallout” is the latest video game to be getting the TV treatment. News of the project comes around four months after it emerged that HBO is adapting another iconic post-apocalyptic game, “The Last Of Us,” for television. A “Halo” series is also in the works at Showtime, and a film based on “Borderlands” currently has Cate Blanchett in one of the lead roles.

There has been talk of a Fallout TV series adaptation for almost a decade.

“Over the last decade, we looked at many ways to bring Fallout to the screen,” said 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.”

“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.”

Through Kilter Films overall deal with Amazon, Nolan and Joy 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. The project had been in development at Amazon when Nolan and Joy inked their deal last year.

The Fallout franchise has posted record sales and received dozens of Game of the Year awards, while its mobile game, Fallout Shelter, has been downloaded more than 170 million times.