The Prime Video TV series adaptation of the popular Fallout video game franchise already had a second season in the works before the first season even started streaming – which turned out to be a good move, because Fallout quickly became Prime Video’s second most-watched title (after The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), drawing in 65 million viewers in its first 16 days of release. Seven months after the show premiered, Deadline has learned that Macaulay Culkin, best known for starring in the first two Home Alone movies, has joined the cast of Fallout season 2. Details on his character are being kept under wraps, but Deadline was able to learn that he’ll be playing the recurring role of “a crazy genius-type character.”
While the first season was primarily filmed in New York (with some filming also taking place in Utah), production is moving to California for season 2. That’s not to take advantage of filming locations there, but rather to get a tax break. The California Film Commission awarded $152 million in tax incentives to a dozen different TV shows earlier this year, and Fallout is on the list. For filming the next season in California, the show will receive $25 million in California tax credits. The budget for the show is quite large, as Variety noted that it has $153 million in qualified expenditures for the season.
Like the video games on which it is based, the “Fallout” series is set in a world where the future envisioned by Americans in the late 1940s explodes upon itself through a nuclear war in 2077. The TV series is telling an original story that is set in the world of the video games and will be canon to the game franchise. The story plays out in and around a fallout shelter in Los Angeles called Vault 33.
In addition to Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4, the video game series also consists of the spin-offs Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 76, Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, Fallout Shelter, and Fallout Pinball. The first game takes place 219 years after nuclear war and is set in a post-apocalyptic Southern California. The protagonist, referred to as the Vault Dweller, is tasked with recovering a water chip in the Wasteland to replace the broken one in their underground shelter home, Vault 13. Afterwards, the Vault Dweller must thwart the plans of a group of mutants, led by a grotesque entity named the Master.
Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner are the showrunners on the Fallout TV series and are executive producing the series with Todd Howard of Bethesda Game Studios, James Altman of Bethesda Softworks, and Athena Wickham, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy of Kilter Films. Amazon Studios and Kilter Films are producing the series, in association with Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks. Nolan and Joy developed the concept for TV, and Nolan directed the first three episodes.
Prime Video’s Fallout stars Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets), Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), Walton Goggins (Justified), Xelia Mendes-Jones (Sans Comic), Aaron Moten (Father Stu), Moisés Arias (The King of Staten Island), Sarita Choudhury (Homeland), Michael Emerson (Person of Interest), Leslie Uggams (Deadpool), Frances Turner (The Boys), Dave Register (Heightened), Zach Cherry (Severance), Johnny Pemberton (Ant-Man), Rodrigo Luzzi (Dead Ringers), and Annabel O’Hagan (Law & Order: SVU).
Purnell’s character is Lucy, who has lived her entire life inside a subterranean vault, where every need and want has been satisfied while generations and generations await the day when it is safe to surface. When a crisis forces Lucy to venture above on a rescue mission, she finds that the planet above remains a hellscape crawling with giant insects, voracious mutant animal “abominations,” and a human population of sunbaked miscreants who make the manners, morals, and hygiene of the gunslinging Old West look like Downton Abbey. Moten’s character is Maximus, who grew up aboveground but, like Lucy, was also raised in a cloistered “family” of sorts—a brutal collective of warriors called the Brotherhood of Steel. The Brotherhood is made up of battalions of super-soldier knights in shining power armor, who stalk the landscape enforcing the Brotherhood’s notion of order. Maximus serves as a squire. MacLachlan plays Lucy’s father, the overseer of Vault 33, which essentially makes him the mayor of their hometown, while Choudhury is a different kind of leader in this world, willing to sacrifice anything for her band of people. Arias plays Lucy’s inquisitive brother. Emerson is an enigmatic researcher named Wilzig.
As Vanity Fair noted, “in the Fallout games, Ghouls are typically cannon fodder, mindless zombies whose bodies have been mutated by radiation.” Goggins’ character is Cooper Howard, a legendary Ghoul who still retains some of the person he used to be. He’s “a gruesomely scarred roughrider who has a code of honor, but also a ruthless streak. He’s also quite a survivor—having existed for hundreds of years. The show occasionally flashes back to the human being he once was, a father and husband named Cooper Howard, before the nuclear holocaust turned the world into a cinder and transformed him into an undead, noseless sharp-shooting fiend.“
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