In a few years, the Fallout franchise will celebrate its 30th anniversary, and it will finally be adapted into a live-action series
In a few years, the Fallout franchise will celebrate its 30th anniversary, and it will finally be adapted into a live-action series.
It’s hard to believe that the Fallout franchise will be 30 years old in a few years and that it will finally be adapted into a live-action series for Prime Video, premiering in April. The upcoming series pretty closely follows the story told in the games, with nuclear war erupting across Earth in the year 2077. In this world, however, everything from clothing to preferred forms of entertainment to vehicle design adheres to a 1940s aesthetic.
Fans have been confused about when the show takes place in the franchise’s lore, but that has been clarified: it will take place 219 years after the war, in the year 2296. That’s nine years after Fallout 4’s events. In an interview with Vanity Fair, game creator and executive producer Todd Howard explains that not only is the show based on the game’s source material, but it’s also all canon.
“We view what’s happening in the show as canon,” Howard says. “That’s what’s great when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion.” He also mentioned that the showrunners and writers added lore that made him jealous. “I sort of looked at it like, ‘Ah, why didn’t we do that’’.
He added that they were clever in how they made the story accessible while still feeling very much like the games. There were apparently many discussions about the humor style, the level of violence, and the style of violence. “Look, Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and postapocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink…. I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show.”
Howard went on to say how he wanted to make the show its own thing without retreading a story he’d already told with the games. “I did not want to do an interpretation of an existing story we did. That was the other thing—a lot of pitches were, you know, ‘This is the movie of Fallout 3…’ I was like, ‘Yeah, we told that story.’ I don’t have a lot of interest in seeing those translated. I was interested in someone telling a unique Fallout story. Treat it like a game. It gives the creators of the series their own playground to play in.”
Fallout stars Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets), Walton Goggins (The Righteous Gemstones), Aaron Moten (Emancipation), Moisés Arias (The King of Staten Island), Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), Sarita Choudhury (Homeland), Michael Emerson (Person of Interest), Leslie Uggams (Deadpool), Frances Turner (The Boys), Dave Register (Heightened), Zach Cherry (Severance), Johnny Pemberton (Ant-Man), Rodrigo Luzzi (Dead Ringers), Annabel O’Hagan (Law & Order: SVU), and Xelia Mendes-Jones (The Wheel of Time).