Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan to direct Fallout TV show at Amazon

Fans have been waiting a long time for a Fallout TV adaptation, and while they’re going to have to wait a little while longer, the show continues to take shape. The latest news from Variety reports that the Amazon show has found its showrunners and a director for the first episode, Jonathan Nolan, the co-creator of HBO’s Westworld.

Although Nolan was first linked to the project as an executive producer alongside Westworld’s other co-creator Lisa Joy when the series was announced in 2020, Thursday’s news is the first that he’d have anything to do with it more directly.

“Fallout is one of the greatest game series of all time,” Joy and Nolan said in a statement at the time. “Each chapter of this insanely imaginative story has cost us countless hours we could have spent with family and friends. So we’re incredibly excited to partner with Todd Howard and the rest of the brilliant lunatics at Bethesda to bring this massive, subversive, and darkly funny universe to life with Amazon Studios.”

Helming the series will be Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, who both have genre credentials of their own. Robertson-Dworet co-wrote the screenplays for Tomb Raider (the 2018 version with Alicia Vikander), Captain Marvel, and an upcoming Star Trek film. Wagner comes with plenty of credits on notable TV shows, including The Office, Portlandia, and Silicon Valley.

Like Arcane, the Netflix show produced by both the streaming site and Riot Games, the Fallout series is being produced by Amazon Studios with Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks.

Just like the games, the show will take place in an alternate timeline where nuclear war between China and the U.S. leave the world a nuclear wasteland. Remnant of humanity emerge after the dust settles, and new civilizations begin to form (often with quirky, ’50s-style aesthetics and technology).

But little more is known about how the show plans on adapting the Fallout universe. At this point, the narrative spans three centuries across more than a dozen video and board games.