Hollywood had been asking Bethesda to make a Fallout movie or TV show for a decade before the hit Prime Video TV show adaptation, according to studio veteran Emil Pagliarulo, but the developer continually refused until they found the right people to run the show.
In an interview with our pals at PC Gamer, Pagliarulo explained why Bethesda kept rejecting pitches from Hollywood. Apparently, it’s all thanks to the face of the studio, Todd Howard.
“Credit to Todd Howard, we could have made a Fallout movie or Fallout TV show a decade ago – we had certainly been asked. But Hollywood, at the time, they wanted to throw ‘the videogame directors’ at us,” said Pagliarulo. “We don’t want the guy who makes videogame movies. We want the best director, the best showrunner possible…a lot of it was waiting to find the right partner, and not just doing it because you could.”
That’s certainly valid. While there are some truly great video game movies – and while it’s true that Hollywood’s reputation for adapting video games for movie and TV has skyrocketed in recent years thanks to gems like the Fallout TV show and HBO’s The Last of Us – 10 years ago that wasn’t the case.
Later in the 2010s you had movies like Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog start to kick off this new and unfamiliar era of actually good and commercially successful video game movies, but a full decade ago, it was a much rarer thing. It’s understandable that the top dogs at Bethesda were hesitant to let Hollywood run wild with one of their most beloved IP, when at the time it couldn’t necessarily be trusted to stick the landing.
Still, ultimately Bethesda found a winning duo in Prime Video’s Fallout showrunners Graham Wagner (Portlandia, The Office, Silicon Valley) and Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider). The show has been a massive critical and commercial success, currently sitting at a 95% approval on Rotten Tomatoes.
Fallout 4 is a great RPG, but it took 10 years and a radioactive lighthouse for me to see it
