Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy made their names as two of Hollywood’s most renowned TV creators when they helmed Westworld for HBO. Michael Crichton’s original Westworld film is a glorified B-movie — a cat-and-mouse thriller about a cybernetic gunslinger relentlessly pursuing a mild-mannered tourist through a series of futuristic, robot-infested theme parks — but Nolan and Joy took that basic premise and turned it into a deeply thought-provoking, philosophical study of sentient artificial intelligence and the dangers of creating technologies beyond our control.
After Westworld ended, Nolan and Joy made the leap to Prime Video and did it all over again. They took a hammy sci-fi property — this time, the Fallout video game franchise — and turned it into something much grander and smarter than its source material. The Fallout games are a lot of fun, but they’re more interested in replicating the Mad Max aesthetic and giving their players a variety of mutants to kill than making any kind of logical sense.
Nolan and Joy took that aesthetic, and that narrative groundwork, and used it as a springboard to create one of the greatest post-apocalyptic TV shows of the past decade. Amazon’s Fallout show is just as visually stunning as The Last of Us, just as darkly hilarious as The Boys, and just as haunting and dystopian as Yellowjackets. It’s one of the best shows on the air right now. But if it wasn’t for Nolan’s brother, famed filmmaker Christopher Nolan, it might not have happened.
Jonathan Nolan Turned To His Brother Christopher For Consultation On Prime Video’s Fallout Show
Jonathan Nolan has been a big part of his brother Christopher Nolan’s career from the very beginning. He wrote the short story that Memento was based on, and went on to co-write the screenplays for The Prestige, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar. The Nolan oeuvre would look very different without his brother’s contributions, and when Jonathan signed on to adapt Fallout, Christopher returned the favor.
It was no easy feat to turn the Fallout games into a TV series. Whereas The Last of Us has a single, linear narrative that HBO could adapt, the Fallout games tell a different story for every player. There are a dozen Fallout games, but they all revolve around a mute, nameless character. The story is determined by the player’s own actions and choices, so there was no real source material for Nolan and Joy to work from. All they had was the worldbuilding — the nuclear apocalypse, the post-apocalyptic factions, the anti-corporate satire — so they brought that world to life. Instead of trying to tell one single, linear Fallout story, they told a bunch of different Fallout stories about a bunch of different characters across a bunch of different factions.
In an interview with Forbes to promote Fallout’s release, Jonathan Nolan explained that he turned to his brother for advice and creative input when he was working on the series. He said that “a gut check” from his brother is a crucial part of his writing process. Coincidentally, at the same time, Christopher Nolan was working on his own tale of nuclear annihilation: his Best Picture-winning biopic Oppenheimer.
A Christopher Nolan Movie Helped Prime Video’s Vision For Fallout Come Alive
When Craig Mazin decided to turn The Last of Us games into a TV show, he brought the idea to Neil Druckmann and HBO and started the proceedings himself. But when Nolan was hired to work on Fallout, he was personally selected by Todd Howard, the director and executive producer of Fallout studio Bethesda.
As the Fallout series first went into development, Howard was working on Starfield, and Interstellar was a major touchstone in the game’s development. Interstellar was Howard’s North Star as he set out to tell his own spacefaring tale. So, he was really eager to get that film’s co-writer involved in the Fallout show. Howard expressly told the powers that be to only meet with other creators and showrunners after Jonah Nolan had made it crystal clear that he would never, ever have anything to do with it (via /Film).
Fortunately for Howard, Nolan was interested enough in the property to meet with him, and excited enough by that meeting to commit to the series. If Howard hadn’t been such a huge fan of Interstellar, and working on an Interstellar-inspired game, then he might not have reached out to the co-writer of Interstellar, and the Fallout show might’ve ended up in the hands of the wrong creators.
Jonathan Nolan Has Big Plans For Fallout’s Future On Prime Video
So far, Fallout has aired two seasons on Prime Video, and they’ve both been a huge success with critics and audiences. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg; Amazon has already renewed the show for a third season, which began filming on July 7 in Los Angeles. In the streaming age, we’re seeing shows take longer and longer breaks between seasons — sometimes up to three or four years just to churn out, like, eight episodes — but Fallout managed to get its second season out in less than two years, and season 3 is aiming to make that gap even narrower.
Fallout has added some exciting new actors to its recurring cast for the third season: Aaron Paul, Manny Jacinto, Emily Mortimer, and Thomasin McKenzie — an already-stacked cast is about to get even more stacked. Frederick E. O. Toye, who directed episodes of seasons 1 and 2 and previously worked on Westworld, has been tapped to direct some episodes of season 3.
We don’t have a firm release date for Fallout season 3, but we can probably expect to see it sometime in 2027. Fallout’s season 2 finale teased some exciting storylines for the third season. Lucy has been reunited with Maximus, The Ghoul is off to find his family in Colorado, Dane has brought Quintus the Liberty Prime blueprints, and the Legion is marching into New Vegas. There are a lot of threads for Fallout to pick up when it returns for season 3. The Liberty Prime tease, in particular, seems to suggest that the third season will borrow heavily from Fallout 3, after season 2 leaned on Fallout: New Vegas.
It’s entirely possible that Amazon is planning to turn Fallout into another sprawling cinematic universe with a slew of sequels and spinoffs. They’ve already done that with Bosch, Reacher, and The Boys, so it stands to reason they’d want Walton Goggins to do a Ghoul series or something.
Source: Forbes, /Film
Fallout
8/10
- Release Date
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April 10, 2024
- Network
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Amazon Prime Video
- Showrunner
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Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan
- Directors
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Frederick E. O. Toye, Wayne Che Yip, Stephen Williams, Liz Friedlander, Jonathan Nolan, Daniel Gray Longino, Clare Kilner