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Now that The Last of Us is over, you should watch these TV shows and movies

It had to end sometime. Season 1 and episode 9 of The Last of Us just finished, and a lot of people are probably bummed they can’t get more postapocalyptic drama. Starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, the show chronicles a lonely man who guides a traumatized teenage girl across an unrecognizable America in the hopes of finding a cure for a fungal virus that has turned most of the world’s population into flesh-eating zombies.

With an impressive 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and a steadily increasing viewership week after week, The Last of Us has already become the greatest video game adaptation ever made and now ranks among some of HBO’s biggest shows. In case anyone is anxious to see more of the series, here are some shows/films similar to The Last of Us that will make the wait for season 2 easier.

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A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place on Hulu
Image used with permission by copyright holder

A Quiet Place follows a family struggling to survive after a race of blind aliens with super-sensitive hearing wipes out almost all of humankind. John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s characters are very similar to Joel’s in that they fight to protect their respective families in this dangerous, new world however they can.

The film holds nothing back in its post-apocalyptic world, as the story begins with the family’s four-year-old getting killed by one of the aliens. But like The Last of Us, there is also a strong sense of melancholy in seeing civilization as it is left to ruins by the film’s antagonists. The sequel this movie spawned only expands on this sense of danger and tragedy, and it shows the first day of the alien invasion similarly to how The Last of Us depicts the beginning of the zombie outbreak.

A Quiet Place is streaming on Paramount+.

The Walking Dead

Carl from The Walking Dead in a cave with an eyepatch, looking defeated.
AMC

The Walking Dead has recently ended its 11-season run on cable television, and The Last of Us seems to have taken its place as TV’s next big zombie franchise. Both shows are character-driven stories about a group of regular people dead-set on surviving in a world littered with the undead and other hostile humans.

While The Walking Dead centers around an entire community of survivors, it shares The Last of Us’s focus on families of choice and how morality changes in a post-apocalyptic world. For those anxious to see an entire saga featuring the zombie apocalypse, now’s as good a time as any to explore the world of The Walking Dead.

All 11 seasons of The Walking Dead are streaming on AMC+.

28 Days Later

Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later.
20th Century Studios / 20th Century Studios

After a young man wakes up from a month-long coma, he finds himself fighting to survive after a virus ravages Great Britain and turns people into zombies. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s film helped bring sprinting zombies into mainstream media, and its impact can be seen in the Infected presented in The Last of Us.

Both stories explore the lengths to which humanity will go in order to survive, with the film depicting a team of soldiers practicing sexual slavery in a desperate attempt to repopulate the Earth. As a result, they each present the dark side of humanity and how they can be no different than the ravenous zombies that destroyed their world, all while questioning the purpose of living without a purpose and presenting people’s desire for meaning.

Logan

Wolverine stands in a forest in Logan.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

This film shows the Wolverine embarking on an adventure to Joel’s, as the aging X-Man travels across the country to bring young Laura to a safe haven for mutants while developing a paternal relationship with her. And like Joel, Logan also struggles to live with his traumatic past and repeatedly pushes people away to avoid seeing them, and therefore himself, get hurt.

Furthermore, there is a lingering bleakness similar to The Last of Us, since almost all mutants have been mysteriously wiped out, Logan nears the end of his life, and nearly everyone he’s come to know and love has died. This film plays less like a superhero movie and more like a somber Western that serves as a perfect sendoff to one of cinema’s most beloved and most tragic antiheroes.

Logan is currently streaming on Disney+.

Children of Men

A pregnant woman is ushered through a hallway in Children of Men.
Universal Pictures

Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian masterpiece takes place in a near future where humanity has been rendered infertile. At the same time, war and poverty have ravaged most of the world, and the U.K. exists as an oppressive and xenophobic police state. Just as Joel travels with Ellie to try and save humanity, Clive Owen’s Theo must help bring a pregnant refugee to safety so as to prevent human extinction.

Like this film, The Last of Us also displays a government leading the last of humanity under strict martial law and a radical militant force seeking to overthrow them. But the warring parties in both stories aren’t black and white, as they all act against the heroes in one way or another. All in all, Children of Men explores how humanity behaves when there doesn’t seem to be any purpose or future for their existence.

Children of Men is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Anthony Orlando
Anthony Orlando is a writer/director from Oradell, NJ. He spent four years at Lafayette College, graduating CUM LAUDE with a…
The Last of Us TV show will return for Season 2 at HBO
Ellie stares at Joel and Tess in the The Last of Us TV show.

HBO has confirmed that the critically acclaimed The Last of Us TV show will return for a second season.
This announcement comes from a tweet posted after only two of the series' episodes have aired. That said, the show garnered critical acclaim, broke some HBO viewership records, and doesn't yet appear to incorporate many plot elements from The Last of Us Part II, so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that the series is continuing. According to the tweet, the second season of the show will air on HBO Max (or whatever that service ends up becoming later this year).  
https://twitter.com/TheLastofUsHBO/status/1619017515581018112
No release window, story, or casting announcements were made in relation to The Last of Us Season 2, although that isn't very surprising as the show's first season is still airing. That said, it seems extremely likely that it would follow the plot of The Last of Us Part II, which sees Ellie go on a quest for revenge after an extremely traumatic event that we won't spoil here. While the second game in this series proved to be much more divisive than the first, there's certainly no shortage of dramatic moments and intriguing plot developments for Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin to adapt to television in another season. The Last of Us is currently airing on HBO and streaming on HBO Max every Sunday night. Digital Trends gave the series a four-star review, with Alex Welch writing that The Last of Us is a "lovingly made, often emotionally riveting adaptation of what is one of the most treasured titles in video game history."

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The 5 best zombie movies ever, ranked
Zombies attack in an elevator in "Dawn of the Dead" (1978).

Zombies have remained one of the most popular aspects of horror media. Since they broke out into mainstream cinema during the 1960s, these undead walkers grew more and more prevalent until they became part of their very own genre. HBO Max's The Last of Us, a series based on the hit video game, is just the latest iteration in a long line of zombie-centric entertainment.

Audiences have seen them as slow-moving shamblers and super-fast predators, but no matter what breed of zombie they are, they will always succeed in giving viewers the frights. Out of all the many zombie films that have risen in the past century, these five are the ones any die-hard horror fan should watch.
5. 1968's Night of the Living Dead
Night of the Living Dead Image used with permission by copyright holder
"They're coming to get you, Barbara." This haunting line set the stage for cinema's first modern zombie film. Director George A. Romero's iconic horror movie was revolutionary for its depiction of violence and gore, and the controversy it stirred caused it to be widely panned upon its release. Nevertheless, the public couldn't get enough of it, and it still became one of the most profitable movies at the time.
Night of the Living Dead has since garnered much critical acclaim, and many scholars have analyzed and interpreted it as a veiled critique of American society and the horrors of the Vietnam War. And thanks to Ben's shocking death at the end of the film, Night of the Living Dead has been considered a significant piece that comments on the racial tensions that can still be felt in America today.

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HBO’s The Last of Us trailer gives a first look at its game-accurate world
Joel and Ellie in HBO's The Last of Us.

HBO released the first full trailer for The Last of Us, its upcoming TV series based on the hit video game franchise. The clip gives fans their first look at the extremely game-accurate world presented in this upcoming HBO series.

Starring Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, HBO's The Last of Us is an attempt to take everything that made the original PlayStation 3 series entry groundbreaking and bring it into reality. This trailer makes a strong case for the adaptation, giving fans a quick breakdown of what to expect from the upcoming show.

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