Sam Raimi's Canceled Horror Movie Quietly Became An HBO Masterpiece

Published Sep 3, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. When Naughty Dog released The Last of Us in 2013, it was a landmark. The game itself wasn’t very technically groundbreaking, but its narrative and character development reached new heights of emotional engagement, and it had a deeply cinematic atmosphere. The Last of Us feels less like a video game and more like an interactive movie, so, naturally, Hollywood came knocking. As early as 2014, after Naughty Dog had scooped up every Game of the Year award in the business, Sony announced that a film adaptation of The Last of Us was in the works. Neil Druckmann, the writer of the video game and creative director at Naughty Dog, was set to write the screenplay, and none other than Sam Raimi — horror royalty on the same level as Wes Craven or John Carpenter — was tapped to direct. While that sounds like a dream, the movie languished in development hell until it was finally declared dead in 2016. The Last of Us wouldn’t get adapted into another medium until a chance meeting between Druckmann and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin years later. In 2023, a full decade after the game first hit shelves, The Last of Us premiered on HBO. Sam Raimi's Last Of Us Movie Would've Been Very Different From The HBO Show A feature film adaptation of The Last of Us was doomed to fail from the jump. A nine-episode TV series gave Druckmann and Mazin enough room to expand the world and deepen the bond between Joel and Ellie, but a movie would’ve been forced to strip away most of the meat and potatoes of the story. As Druckmann worked through draft after draft of the screenplay, he eventually reached a stalemate with the studio. Druckmann was writing a gritty, grounded, The Road-style thriller, which is what The Last of Us is, but the suits at the studio wanted to make a big, action-packed blockbuster like World War Z, which is not what The Last of Us is. The studio wanted lots of set-pieces, but the substance of The Last of Us is in its quieter dramatic scenes. It’s hard to imagine a Raimi-directed version of The Last of Us working out. Raimi is one of the masters of horror cinema — a pioneer that filmmakers still look up to — but his brand of horror is very different from The Last of Us. The Last of Us is intensely realistic, but Raimi’s horror movies are basically live-action cartoons. Raimi would’ve had a lot of fun with the body horror of Cordyceps infections (imagine Raimi’s Rat King!), but he might’ve struggled to land the emotional drama of Joel and Ellie’s father-daughter relationship. We Ultimately Got The Best Possible Version Of A Last Of Us Adaptation HBO / Courtesy Everett Collection The first season of HBO’s The Last of Us wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was arguably the best possible adaptation we could hope for. There’s no way they could’ve crammed The Last of Us into two hours, and it would’ve felt rushed and truncated if they did. But the TV show had the time to do the story justice. Nothing could beat the original game, but the TV show came darn close in season 1. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey recaptured the authentic chemistry between Joel and Ellie without just doing carbon copies of Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson’s performances. Mazin and Druckmann used their cold opens to build on the characters and storylines and mythology of the game. Now, season 2 was a different story. That was nowhere near the best possible version of The Last of Us Part II; they gave away all the twists upfront, threw subtlety and subtext out the window, and fumbled Ellie’s descent into darkness. The Last of Us can bring it around in season 3, when it goes back and tells Abby’s story, but it needs to be a lot more deferential to the game, like season 1 was.