Noah Hawley has a message for Far Cry fans hoping for a faithful game adaptation: the story you skipped to get back to shooting is exactly why he's doing something else.
The Fargo and Alien: Earth creator told Deadline that his upcoming Far Cry series won't directly adapt any of the games in the franchise. His reasoning cuts to the heart of the game-to-screen adaptation challenge - and it's going to spark debate.
"When you play a video game, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cut scenes that you can skip," Hawley explained. "That makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline. That is death for a show."
He's not wrong, exactly. Video game narratives are structured fundamentally differently from television. Games prioritize player agency and interactivity; TV requires narrative control and character development. The cutscene - that awkward hybrid of cinema and gameplay - is often where game stories happen, but it's also where player engagement drops.
But here's where it gets thorny: Far Cry fans have been playing these games for two decades. They know Vaas Montenegro. They remember Pagan Min. They've experienced the stories, even if they occasionally hit the skip button. Telling them those stories are "irrelevant" is like telling Lord of the Rings fans that Tolkien's prose was too dense, so you're just keeping the vibes.
Hawley describes his approach as having "a dialog with this franchise" - similar to what he did with Legion for X-Men and Alien: Earth for the Alien franchise. He's not interested in direct adaptation; he wants to explore what a Far Cry story could be.
On one level, this is encouraging. Hawley is a proven television auteur who understands tone, character, and long-form storytelling. If anyone can crack the Far Cry code for television, it's probably him.
On another level, it's frustrating for fans who've been asking for game adaptations that actually respect the source material. The Last of Us succeeded precisely because it didn't skip the cutscenes - it elevated them, expanding on the game's story while preserving its emotional core. Arcane took League of Legends lore seriously and created one of the best animated series in recent memory.
The counterargument is that Far Cry isn't The Last of Us. The franchise has always been more about satirical open-world chaos than deep narrative. Each game tells a self-contained story about a stranger thrust into a conflict between a charismatic villain and desperate rebels. The formula works in games; whether it works in television is an open question.
"I'm saying much as I did with the Coens or X-Men or Alien, 'Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is,'" Hawley said. "We can have a larger conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of adapting video games."
Fair enough. But that conversation should probably include the people who actually played the games - and didn't skip all the cutscenes.
In Hollywood, nobody knows anything - except that telling gamers their story didn't matter is a bold strategy. Let's see if it pays off.
