ruoyanchen
Ruoyan Chen | Business of Media | Video Streaming
Ruoyan is a media scholar and filmmaker based in New York. She is pursuing a MA degree in NYU's Media, Culture, and Communication program. Born and raised in Beijing, lived in Boston and Los Angeles, her work is influenced by the contrastive culture and space between the two countries.
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Video Game Adaptation, The Last of Us, Achieves HBO Original Drama’s Highest Viewership Growth
'The Last of Us' stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey | PHOTOGRAPHED BY RYAN PFLUGER | The Hollywood Reporter
According to Variety, HBO’s new zombie drama, The Last of Us, adapted from a Sony Playstation video game of the same name, broke the HBO Original series record for the “largest week 2 audience growth.” Debuted on January 15, 2023, the first episode of “The Last of Us” had a strong opening, reaching over 10 million viewers in its first two days, and became the most-watched HBO premiere in more than a decade, only behind House of the Dragon.
Written by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and the game creator Neil Druckmann, the story sets in a post-apocalyptic world, where a fungal infection has wiped out much of humanity and turned people into zombies. The protagonist, Joel (Pedro Pascal, The Mandalorian), a hardened survivor who lost his daughter, is forced to smuggle a teenage girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsey, Game of Thrones), outside the suppressed quarantine zone to find a cure for the society that falls to the virus for 20 years.
The video game was developed by the Sony-owned video game company, Naughty Dog, and released in 2013. It has sold more than 37 million copies worldwide with its sequel. With the massive acclaim of the video game, it is not surprising that the drama series has immediate popularity. However, video game adaptations have mostly had a notoriously weak performance. Naughty Dog’s former video game film adaptation, Uncharted, had an admirable box office, but only scored 41% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. The Last of Us chose a series format over a film to fully reveal the complex and heartbreaking storyline. According to the Hollywood Reporter’s interview with Mazin, “the way to break the video game curse is to adapt the best video game ever – not by a little, but by a lot.” At the same time, most PlayStation games are made for the TV size screens, which are in line with the TV series in terms of watching experience. So far, The Last of Us has been receiving positive reviews, but it remains to be seen whether it will maintain as favorable as more episodes are released.
On the other hand, the HBO series debut will benefit Sony’s future plans for its video game franchise. According to Variety, Sony intends to broaden the gaming universe of The Last of Us with a multiplayer, live-service game. Despite PlayStation's success, the console players only contributed 28% of the $184 billion global video games market in 2022. “The Last of Us Part 1” is set to a Windows release on March 3 to boost its popularity on the PC end, utilizing the attention seized from the drama series. It starts to seem like an efficient business model to sustain both the film and game industries.
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Hello and Welcome!
Hello, my name is Ruoyan Chen, and I will be your course assistant for this semester. I am a graduate student in the MCC program, and I look forward to reading everyone’s posts and insights!
My sector is Video Streaming, and I will be following the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and the Wall Street Journal.
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