Maisie Williams To Star in Movie That Sounds Suspiciously Like THE LAST OF US
Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams is awesome as Arya Stark, but sooner or later she's going to have to break away from that character and continue to craft her career moving forward. Hopefully she'll be able to do that as successfully as the former Harry Potter stars, but time will tell. One of the projects she's been talking up over the past year has been a film adaptation of the popular video game The Last of Us. But that project doesn't have much momentum behind it right now, and I just received a press release for a project that Williams will star in that sounds pretty similar to the storyline of the video game. Here are the relevant sections:
Writer/Director Kate Maberly (The Secret Garden, Finding Neverland) and Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow) announced today that they will jointly produce the project The Forest of Hands and Teeth, written by Maberly. In addition, Maberly and Liman announced that British actress Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) has just been attached to play the lead. Production is lining up for 2016, with Kate Maberly directing.
“The Forest of Hands and Teeth” is adapted from the New York Times best-selling novel by Carrie Ryan. The story is set “sometime in the future”, in a world where most of the human race has been taken by a bloodthirsty virus that leaves them roaming the planet as unconsecrated cannibals. Mary (to be played by Williams) seeks a bigger world beyond the fenced off village of survivors, and the survival of the human race seems dependent upon her success in leading a ragtag group through the dark depths of The Forest of Hands and Teeth.
So let's take a look at the comparisons between this movie and The Last of Us. Sometime in the future? Check. Virus causing bloodthirsty cannibalism? Check. Human race dependent on the survival of a young girl as she travels outside of her village? Check. The Forest of Hands and Teeth may end up being a good movie, but as someone who was very much looking forward to seeing Williams star in a Last of Us film, I wonder if it might be so similar that she'd do this movie and then bail on the video game adaptation because she would have already tackled a story too close to that one. We'll have to wait and see how it all plays out, but this may be a defining moment in the game adaptation's history.