For those unaware, there was nearly a Last of Us movie before HBO decided to give the wonderful video game franchise a series. As recently explained by Neil Druckmann, however, due to somewhat hilarious reasons, it never happened.

Luckily for us, new details have emerged as to why.

The Last of Us movie

The Last of Us movie, Neil Druckmann

Game director Neil Druckmann went on the Script Apart podcast to discuss what exactly went wrong. In a not so shocking turn of events, an unnamed studio wanted The Last of Us movie to be pretty much everything the games aren't. You'd think Hollywood would have learned its lesson after adapting Super Mario, but here we are!

“When I worked on the movie version, a lot of the thinking and notes (from the studio) were like ‘how do we make it bigger? How do we make the set pieces bigger?’”

“It didn’t work for The Last of Us and I think that’s ultimately why the movie wasn’t made,” Neil Druckmann said.

There's obviously some good news here. The story is almost certainly better off as a television show as opposed to a movie. After all, there's just so much to unpack it's hard to imagine a 120-minute movie doing it justice. Moreover, especially with there being two games in the series, as well as the chance for a show to break into different branches to focus on different characters in a way video games can't, a better understanding of the world's history, lore and relationships could be had.

Neil Druckmann certainly knows this.

“Our approach for The Last of Us was ‘Let’s make it as an indie film’,” Druckmann revealed. “Let’s approach it as an indie film team, the way it’s shot, the way how small and intimate it feels. And with the show we get to lean into that even more because we don’t have to have as many action sequences as we do in the game.”

We still got time until the show hits HBO. Given the history of the franchise, as well as HBO as a developer of quality shows, this seems like a match made in heaven.

Sure, a The Last of Us Movie would have also been great, but this one — from a “feels” perspective — just hits better.