Jonathan Nolan is currently gearing up for the release of his next ambitious Fallout series, based on the popular video game series of the same name. Gamers and general audiences alike are excited about what the maverick director will bring to the world of Fallout. Nolan is an executive producer of the show and is soon coming to Amazon Prime.
Nolan and his wife, Lisa Joy, previously created the acclaimed sci-fi series Westworld. However, the series was canceled by HBO after four seasons and Nolan couldn’t complete his narrative. The director recently declared that he is planning to bring closure to his sci-fi series in one way or the other in the future.
Jonathan Nolan Plans to Bring a Definitive End to Westworld Despite its Cancellation
Before being an executive producer on the latest Fallout series, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy created one of HBO’s flagship shows, Westworld. The series led by Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright, and James Marsden chronicled the complex dynamic between humans and the ‘hosts’, with future seasons shifting to the real world which is under the control of AI.
However, after four seasons and declining critical and audience reception, HBO canceled the series after 4 seasons. The series was even removed from Max, shipping it off to other free and ad-free platforms (via Entertainment Weekly). But Nolan is not deterred by this and plans to finish his narrative of the show as revealed to The Hollywood Reporter.
Nolan further stated that he is very proud of what he has done with Westworld and desires to bring closure to the story. He gave an example of Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar which took him 8 years to make, further doubling down on being a completionist and doing no matter what to get his stories told. He said,
“Yes. 100 percent. We’re completionists. It took me eight years and a change of director to get Interstellar made. We’d like to finish the story we started. I’m so f—ing proud of what we made. It was an extraordinary experience.
I think it would be a mistake to look back and only feel regret [over how it ended]. But there’s still very much a desire to finish it… If you get a chance to go again, then great. If the lesson was to ease back on the complexity or the weirdness of something, I don’t want to learn that lesson.”
With the show now out of HBO’s control, Nolan might find another streaming giant to distribute and finance his unfinished Westworld series. While he is busy with his new Fallout series and its future seasons, he is still working on the sidelines for Westworld season 5 to happen. It remains to be seen how the project materializes in the future.
Jonathan Nolan and the Creators of Fallout were Inspired by The Success of The Last of Us
Last year’s The Last of Us changed people’s negative perceptions about video game adaptations and showed that with great conviction and narrative, it can create magic on screen. It seems the bonafide success of the show gave a lot of hope to the team behind Amazon’s Fallout series.
In an interview with Collider, Jonathan Nolan revealed that when they were starting out with the show, the bar was very low. However, seeing the huge success of The Last of Us and the kind of impact that it had, making Fallout became easier and also inspired Nolan and the team to make a top-tier show. He said,
“The bar was not only not high, it was non-existent — especially in the TV space. You would have people adapting a first-person game and [a studio would be like,] ‘So the show is going to have a first-person point of view.’ No, that’s a grammatical tick of the game, that’s not how you adapt it. It’s always nice to be the first one. But when somebody makes something as good as The Last of Us, it makes it easier, because suddenly everyone understands what’s possible.”
The post-apocalyptic series will star Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins, Kyle MacLachlan, Mike Doyle, Moisés Arias, Johnny Pemberton, and Cherien Dabis, among many others. Amazon is dropping all of the 8 episodes of Fallout on April 11, 2024.
