The Last Of Us Actor Says Sam Raimi's Version Was "Never Gonna Be A Great Movie"
HBO's The Last of Us has become one of the hottest shows in the network's history as it gains greater viewership with nearly every new episode, something of a rarity for a debut series. While the latest episode dropped early, to precede the 2023 Superbowl, there exists an alternate universe where the live-action adaptation wouldn't have been a serialised television show, but a movie.
And apparently, this movie version just wouldn't have been very good. That's according to actor Jeffrey Pierce, who played Joel's younger brother Tommy Miller in the video game and Kansas City enforcer Perry on the HBO show. Pierce recently spoke with EW about the planned movie reworking of the game, a treatment that was ultimately scrapped.
Related: One Scene Of The Last Of Us Ep 5 Took 65 Prosthetic Artists 5 Hours To Prepare
Pierce remembers that he attended a highly secretive table read, assembled by Sony studio Screen Gems which was developing the movie adaptation with director and producer Sam Raimi. Pierce was reading the same part for the movie as he plays in the game, the role of Joel's brother Tommy. But the actor believes this treatment wouldn't have been able to do justice to the story that Neil Druckmann had created.
"As good as it was, it was never gonna be a great movie", Pierce told EW. "In a two-hour runtime, how are you gonna tell 14, 17 hours of story?" The actor also revealed that there had been talks for an "animation motion-capture movie series" but this too didn't sound like the best direction to go, according to Pierce. But eventually things took a better turn.
"The second that I heard that Neil and Craig [Mazin] had lunch together — I had just watched Chernobyl in a hotel room in Vancouver or something and was
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