With Amazon’s Fallout series tearing up the review charts, you might be wondering if Bethesda Softworks has any other plans to turn its properties into TV shows or movies. The publisher has quite a few IP under its belt, after all, many of which might make for a solid game-to-show adaptation—like The Elder Scrolls. However, Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard has said that, while he can’t predict the future, he would “probably say no” to an Elder Scrolls TV show right now.
IGN stopped Howard in his tracks on the red carpet of Fallout’s LA premiere earlier this week to ask him a few questions. The show was, of course, the main topic of discussion, but the interviewer also asked whether Bethesda Softworks was considering other game-to-show adaptations. Some have called the Amazon series one of the best video game adaptations, so maybe Bethesda would think about doing it again? Well, never say never, of course, but for the time being, there are no such plans. For Howard to approve an adaptation of The Elder Scrolls, he would need the stars to align.
“I don’t know. There’s nothing in the works,” Howard told IGN on the red carpet. “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.”
For as fun as the project might’ve been for Howard, it wasn’t something he was initially enthusiastic about. In fact, he told IGN that he didn’t want to make a Fallout TV show for a long time. That is, until he met director and screenwriter Jonathan Nolan.
“This is something that I said no to for like, a decade,” Howard said. “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.”
Kotaku has reached out to Bethesda for comment.
It seems that Howard, the critics, and the fans alike are happy with how the Fallout series turned out. The show captures the vibe of the games without getting too weighed down by the lore, making it a nice entry point for Fallout newbies and a compelling new story for Fallout diehards. And guess what? There’s apparently more of it on the way, as Amazon is seemingly already preparing a second season.