The Last Of Us has now become HBO’s second-biggest series premiere in 13 years. The show based on the popular PlayStation title has already garnered glowing reviews, and is now in HBO’s history books as one of its biggest openers.
As reported by Variety, the show had around 4.7 million viewers in the US jointly across the HBO channel and HBO max, according to data from Neilsen and WB Discovery. It is second only to House of the Dragon, which opened to ten million viewers, and which averaged around 30 million viewers per episode.
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HBO also said that “Sunday night viewership for an HBO series typically represents 20 to 40 percent of the show’s total gross audience per episode”. This means that the viewership has potential to grow as the show progresses. HBO and HBO Max chairman, Casey Bloys, mentioned how thrilled he was that fans of the game get to “experience this iconic story in a new way”. He also congratulated Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann for helping in adapting the game into a TV show. Mazin and Druckmann also thanked the fans for such a great response and said that their sole focus was to make the “best possible adaptation” of the story.
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Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, who play Joel and Ellie, have also received praise for their performance. Troy Baker, Joel’s original voice actor in the game, was also inspired by Pascal’s rendition of the role. There isn’t any news on the sequel for the show yet, but based on the reception, perhaps we can expect one in the future. However, don’t expect any spin-offs for the series as Naughty Dog has no plans to tell “any other stories”.
In other news, it was revealed that the actors who provided the noises for the clickers in the games returned to do the same for the show, an observation which was confirmed by Naughty Dog Info on Twitter, while there are also plenty of Easter Eggs for fans of the games to spot in the adaptation.