It already happened with ‘Game of Thrones’. The monumental success of the HBO fantasy series sparked a fever for medieval fantasy with overtones of political intrigue that everyone wanted to jump on. Series like ‘The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power’, ‘The Witcher’ or ‘The House of the Dragon’ itself are echoes of that success, and now we are on the way to experiencing a phenomenon comparable to the success of ‘The Last of Us’, also from HBO Max.
The end of the world never went out of style (indeed, what is ‘The Last of Us’ if not a reverberation of ‘The Walking Dead’), but devastating plant-based threats are now trending, so Prime Video has decided to adapt an entire literary science fiction classic: ‘The Day of the Triffids’. For this, it has Johan Renck, director of all the episodes of ‘Chernobyl’ (although not with Craig Mazin, brain of the series and now enjoying the honeys of success with ‘The Last of Us’).
‘The Day of the Triffids’ is a 1951 John Wyndham novel that narrates an invasion of plant beings from outer space. His visions of a desolate world with almost no survivors have been tremendously influential, and despite this, his adaptations are not very popular: there is a 1963 film and some miniseries (the most popular, from the BBC in 2009, to which he belongs the header image).
Amazon’s version is somewhat experimental with the format: The purpose of Prime Video is to make several miniseries, each one with protagonists and from different countries, with the aim of reflecting a truly global invasion. Now it’s a matter of seeing if they can escape the temptation to make an end of the world excessively similar to the one presented to us by HBO.
