Netflix’s ambitious 'Horizon Zero Dawn’ show dies after showrunner’s allegations

Last week, a Rolling Stone report accused Steve Blackman of „fostering a toxic workplace” on the set of The Umbrella Academy, which is set to air its final season on Netflix. Now, that seems to have killed his future projects, including a hugely ambitious live-action adaptation of Sony’s video game Horizon Zero Dawn.

On a piece of Cheyenne Roundtree, released last week, accused Blackman of firing a woman because he was upset she was pregnant and didn’t tell her when she was hired. Among other issues, he cited sexist, homophobic, and transphobic comments in Sex, and he credited the work of „manipulators” and others. Blackman denies the allegations, calling them „absolutely untrue” and „absolutely ridiculous.”

But Netflix might not agree. After a few days, Roundtree reported Two of Blackman’s in-development series, Horizon Zero Dawn and the original show Orbital, are no longer moving forward. “Don’t move forward anymore With Blackman,” but in general. It’s not impossible that Horizon will be resurrected at some point, but it’s already been years since it came out, and if Blackman was designing at this point it would be further set back.

Even in this age of great video game adaptations from Fallout to The Last of Us , the idea that Netflix could effectively adapt something like Horizon Zero Dawn has always drawn a fair amount of skepticism from those who’ve played the series.

The biggest problem with a series like this is the budget, where the whole concept is a sprawling, impossibly large wasteland environment, made up of exceptionally detailed, terrifying robotic animals and dinosaurs that the hero, Aloy, fights with technologically advanced arrows, spears and traps. .

It’s hard to see how the series could have done this without A) spending an ungodly amount of money on every episode being half a Transformers movie or B) creating sub-par effects or dramatically reducing the robots. Or they can spend all the money Still As we’ve seen in many CG-heavy projects of late, it may not look good.

This is not a problem that has plagued other video game adaptations to the same extent. Fallout has its CG creatures here and there, but an almost entirely human cast with practical effects for the monsters. The Last of Us is the same, and all humans have practical consequences for its many plant-zombies. Nothing like a hundred-foot-tall Robo-T-Rex or Mammoth. But yes, those shows use a good amount of VFX for their worlds, and they don’t come cheap, mind you.

Amazon’s promised, upcoming God of War adaptation will be the only video game adaptation that compares to Horizon, which will be similarly expensive with its mythical beasts and wild fight scenes with Kratos. But Amazon has more money than God and they’ve already shown they can do this once with Fallout.

I don’t know if we’ll see Horizon again in the near future, but at the very least, it’s a good thing it didn’t happen given Blackman’s behavior.

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