Why This Summer’s Best Movie Was a Video Game

At least six years in the making, with a crew of thousands and a budget likely in the neighborhood of $100 million, Sony’s The Last of Us Part II could easily be confused with a big-screen action epic. In fact, although it’s a video game, TLOU2—as fans have dubbed it—has served as a stand-in for multiplex megahits in the weirdest summer in Hollywood history. The game shattered sales records, and videos of the action quickly racked up tens of millions of views on YouTube as fans binged on the 30-plus hours of gameplay much as they might do with a top-tier Netflix series. “Video games have reached a level of realism where in-game cinematics can now rival blockbuster films,” says Matthew Kanterman, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “Big studios are even using game development tools to make movies these days.”

Video games have long included snippets of prerecorded video or animation to advance the story, but TLOU2 raises the bar by crafting a cinematic experience from start to finish. The plot unspools in the time after, yes, a pandemic, which has turned most of Earth’s population into zombies. The characters make their way through richly detailed landscapes of Wyoming’s Grand Teton mountains and across fields and forests to a post-apocalyptic Seattle where buildings, bridges, and highways are rendered as lushly overgrown ruins. The movement is on par with the best animated features, the characters are nuanced, and the dialogue is mature and compelling, says game critic David Milner.