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With the recent Arcane: League of Legends, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and The Last of Us, TV creators adapted popular video games into acclaimed series (thus cracking a code that still vexes filmmakers). Now we have a new contender, with the April 11 release of Prime Video’s Fallout — which, with any luck, will be more revered than radioactive.
Based on the video game series of the same name and adapted by Westworld’s Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, Fallout is “the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have,” Amazon MGM Studios says.
“Two-hundred years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind,” the studio’s description continues, “and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them.”
Here’s what we know about this much-hyped video game adaptation.
Its source material is a 26-year-old video game franchise
The first Fallout title, subtitled A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game, hit the market in 1997 and has sold 600,000 units. Then came sequels — 1998’s Fallout 2, 2008’s Fallout 3, and 2015’s Fallout 4 — and spinoffs — including the popular Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout Shelter.
“Fallout is one of the greatest game series of all time,” Joy and Nolan said when the TV series was announced. “Each chapter of this insanely imaginative story has cost us countless hours we could have spent with family and friends.”
Fallout’s television adaptation has been in the works for more than three years
After months of negotiations, Amazon MGM Studios licensed the rights to the Fallout series in July 2020, with Nolan and Joy developing the series through their Kilter Films banner and Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks on board as production companies, as Deadline reported at the time.
“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,” Albert Cheng, now head of Prime Video U.S., said in a statement at the time. “We’re thrilled to join with Bethesda to bring Fallout to television.”
And in January 2022, Fallout fans found out that Geneva Robertson-Dworet (co-writer of the film Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (a co-executive producer of Silicon Valley) would serve as showrunners of Fallout and that Nolan would direct the first episode.
The TV series “exists in the same world” as the video games
In November 2022, Bethesda Game Studios director Todd Howard told podcaster Lex Fridman that the Fallout TV series will accompany but not directly translate the video games.
“When people would, say, want to make a movie, they wanted to tell the story of Fallout 3 or then tell the story of Fallout 4,” Howard said. “And for this, it was, hey, let’s do something that exists in the world of Fallout. It’s not retelling a game story. It’s basically an area of the map, and let’s tell a story here that fits in the world that we have built, doesn’t break any of the rules, can reference things in the games, but isn’t a retelling of the games. It exists in the same world but is its own unique thing.”
Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, and Walton Goggins lead the cast
Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets) plays Lucy, “an optimistic Vault-dweller with an all-American can-do spirit [whose] peaceful and idealistic nature is tested when she is forced to the surface to rescue her father,” Amazon MGM Studios says.
Aaron Moten (Next) portrays Maximus, “a young soldier who rises to the rank of squire in the militaristic faction called Brotherhood of Steel” who “will do anything to further the Brotherhood’s goals of bringing law and order to the wasteland.”
Courtesy of Prime Video
And Walton Goggins (Justified) plays the Ghoul, seen above, “a morally ambiguous bounty hunter who holds within him a 200-year history of the post-nuclear world.”
The studio teases that these three characters will collide in pursuit of “an artifact from an enigmatic researcher that has the potential to radically change the power dynamic in this world.”
Other familiar faces includes Kyle MacLachlan, Sarita Choudhury, and Michael Emerson
The Fallout cast also includes Kyle McLachlan (Twin Peaks), pictured with Purnell below, as Hank, Lucy’s father and the overseer of Vault 33, who is “eager to change the world for the better.”
Courtesy of Prime Video
Meanwhile, Sarita Choudhury (And Just Like That…), Michael Emerson (Lost), Moisés Arias (The King of Staten Island), Leslie Uggams (Deadpool), Frances Turner and Annabel O’Hagan (both of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit), Dave Register (FBI), Zach Cherry (Severance), Johnny Pemberton (Ant-Man), Rodrigo Luzzi (Dead Ringers), and Xelia Mendes-Jones (The Wheel of Time) are also on the call sheet.
Ramin Djawadi is scoring the Fallout TV series
Composer Ramin Djawadi — who won back-to-back Emmys for his Game of Thrones soundtrack and also provides the music of House of the Dragon — will score Fallout. The project reunites him with Joy and Nolan, as he also did the score for Westworld.
The show is set in Los Angeles but was filmed elsewhere in the United States and even in Namibia
An August 2023 X post from Prime Video revealed that Fallout’s Vault 33 is located in Los Angeles, but a filming notice from a year earlier revealed New York, New Jersey, and Utah as filming locations. And Nolan mentioned in a December 2023 interview with IGN that the cast and crew also shot scenes on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast.
Fallout, Series Premiere, Thursday, April 11, Prime Video