Amazon’s ‘Fallout’ Showrunners Defend Changes To Franchise Canon: “There Might’ve Been A Time When You Were A Philistine If You Deviated In An Adaptation, But Not Anymore”
Despite the fact that many of the changes they made to the overall franchise canon did not sit well with large swaths of its fandom, the showrunners behind Amazon’s live-action Fallout show are sticking by their decision to play fast and loose with the original games’ post-apocalyptic lore.
Despite being both critically and fan acclaimed as one of the better Hollywood video game adaptations, Amazon’s Fallout series is not without its issues, the most glaring of which is perhaps the fact that, thanks to its confirmed status as canonical to the original mainline games, its story and setting directly retcons large parts of the franchise’s well-established history.
From the confirmation that the NCR and Legion factions of Fallout: New Vegas fame have far less power than originally depicted (with the former even being implicitly wiped out by the Brotherhood of Steel at the end of the first season and the latter seemingly non-existent), to the revival of the Enclave following their elimination at the end of Fallout 2, to the reveal that rather than using the political turmoil around them to their own greedy ends Vault-Tec was actually directly responsible for the dropping of the bombs that turned the world into the nightmarish landscape it now exists as, and much, much more, many fans were baffled (though admittedly not wholly surprised) to see the production team at Amazon so blatantly making changes to the world they knew and love.
However, despite the timeline issues and discrepancies sparked by the series’ changes to canon, showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner are standing by their creative choices.
Pressed during a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Mikey O’Connell as to whether “As IP goes, do you find that video games make for looser adaptations than books?”, Wagner argued, “Jane Austen isn’t sacred anymore. There might’ve been a time when you were a Philistine if you deviated in an adaptation, but not anymore.”
“For Fallout, we did alter the course of the game’s canonical history,” the former Silicon Valley producer admitted. “There was a Reddit thread that had to get shut down. (Laughs.) People were so mad. So it is sort of the new sacred cow in a way. That makes it kind of fun to play with.”
Bouncing off of her partner’s thoughts, Robertson-Dworet added, “Because it’s an open world game, there are many ways the narrative can unfold. It’s not as locked, sequentially, as The Last of Us — where they did a beautiful, very direct adaptation of the video game story. We didn’t have that option, because everyone who plays the game does it in a different order.”
“That was wonderfully liberating, because we got to come up with our own story and our own characters within this world,” said the Captain Marvel co-screenwriter. “When we started this project, we asked ourselves, “What characters would we want to create in this world and mythology?”
At current, the second season of Amazon’s Fallout is currently in production.
However, no official release date has yet been suggested.
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