What just happened? The weekend saw a couple of trailers drop for two highly anticipated upcoming series: The Last of Us and The Witcher: Blood Origin. The former is the first official one for HBO’s show, and it gives us a good look at what to expect, including a particularly menacing Bloater.
HBO had previously only released an almost dialogue-free teaser for The Last of Us. The first official trailer shows more of Pedro Pascal’s Joel escorting Bella Ramsey’s Ellie west across the post-apocalyptic US as they search for a cure for the parasitic fungus known as Cordyceps Brain Infection, which Ellie is immune to.
Any show based on a beloved video game franchise will always cause some trepidation among fans, especially after the awful Resident Evil Netflix series that was canceled after one very unpopular season. But HBO’s The Last of Us was written by Craig Mazin, responsible for the miniseries Chernobyl, voted one of the best TV shows of all time, and Neil Druckmann, writer and director of the game.
The trailer includes many nods to the games, including a-ha’s Take on Me—Ellie plays an acoustic version of the song in The Last of Us Part II. There’s also a Bloater emerging from the ground at the end of the clip.
The nine-episode first season of the original drama will air on January 15, 2023, at 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO and be available to stream in 4K via HBO Max.
Elsewhere, we also got to see the first full trailer for The Witcher: Blood Origin. The series is set 1,200 years before The Witcher show. However, there’s an appearance by Joey Batey’s Jaskier, singer of the endlessly catchy Toss A Coin To Your Witcher, at the end, presumably via some time/world-travelling shenanigans. The trailer also includes British actor Sir Lenny Henry, fresh from his role as Sadoc Burrows in Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, as Chief Sage Balor.
The Witcher: Blood Origin, a four-part series, airs on Netflix this December 25. The next main Witcher series, probably the last to feature Henry Cavill, arrives next summer.
