With the Fallout TV show on Amazon Prime Video getting rave reviews, the question on everyone’s mind is whether Bethesda will try to replicate that magic with the Elder Scrolls franchise.
After all, Hollywood insider Daniel Ritchman said around three and a half years ago that Netflix might be producing such a show. However, speaking to IGN while on the red carpet premiere of Fallout’s adaptation, Bethesda’s Todd Howard denied there was anything in the works and added he’d probably say no anyway.
I don’t know. There’s nothing in the works. Everybody asks, like, about Elder Scrolls, and I keep saying no also. And I would approach those – I’ll probably say no. You never know if someone’s gonna click. But I think this really came out of, ‘we think things are aligning to do a high-quality job.’ It wasn’t forced. It was kind of a natural relationship and ‘hey, this sounds really cool.’ As opposed to, ‘we should have a show,’ right? It never came from that.”
I can’t predict the future, but this has been one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever done, and we’re just kind of over the moon, everybody in the studio with seeing it this way.
At the same time, Howard (who was an executive producer on the Fallout TV show) was very excited, as you can guess from the last paragraph of the previous quote. And when he talked about adapting Fallout, he admitted he also adopted the same stance until Jonathan Nolan came along.
This is something that I said no to for like, a decade. Everyone wanted to make a (Fallout) TV show or a movie, and I was like, ‘nahhh.’ I wasn’t really feeling it.
I met Jonah – Jonathan Nolan – and I love his work: The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Person of Interest, and then Westworld, and he and I kind of hit it off. And I felt like, ‘hey, do you wanna do this? I’d like to approach it like it’s another entry in the games.’ Like, let’s do a new location, new story, let him and his crazy lunatic people he works with kind of do what they do, and we’re really happy with how it turned out.
As such, it’s reasonable to expect Howard’s reservations about an Elder Scrolls show to potentially disappear when faced with the right project and creative team.
Meanwhile, fans will be able to enjoy the world of Tamriel through Elder Scrolls Online (which just turned ten) and the upcoming Elder Scrolls VI, now in early production at Bethesda.