Video game adaptation films and TV shows haven't exactly had a good reputation historically, though that's begun to change in recent years with the release of several well-received projects. Perhaps the most prominent of these is Amazon's Fallout TV show, which debuted in Spring 2024 and has now premiered Season 2 on Prime Video this week.
Season 1 was so popular that it attracted over 100 million viewers and led to a resurgence for the Fallout video games, and Season 2 is poised to not only continue that success, but elevate it even higher, also. In fact, now that its first episode has released, the second season's critic scores have gone live on Rotten Tomatoes — revealing that it's now broken two of the platforms records.
Firstly, the Fallout show now has the highest-rated Season 2 of any live-action video game adaptation, with its sky-high 96% critic score beating out The Last of Us Season 2's 92% rating. Notably, that score is also higher than Fallout Season 1's 93%, meaning critics have, on average, rated it a bit more favorably than its debut set of episodes.
The series as a whole is also now the highest-scored live-action video game adaptation ever produced, with an average 95% critic rating for both seasons that narrowly beats The Last of Us' 94% score. The next closest project is the Halo show at 80%, followed by Twisted Metal at 79% and The Witcher at 75%.
Something unique about Fallout, though, is that it also has a 95% audience score to match its critic rating — something most of these other adaptations can't boast. The Last of Us comes in at 62%, Halo's is at 61%, and The Witcher's ranks the lowest at 46%. The exception is Twisted Metal, which has an audience rating 10% higher than its critic score at 89%.
This signals that the Fallout show is resonating with regular viewers — many of which include longtime fans of the games it's adapting — as much as it is with critics, which brings us to the fact it's now tied with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners as the highest-rated video game adaptation by audiences (live action or animated) with its 95% score.
The first episode of Season 2 has a 96% audience rating, and if its seven other episodes rank this highly, too, we could see the second season give the Fallout show's overall score a boost past the Cyberpunk 2077-inspired show. That would be a third Rotten Tomatoes record broken by Amazon's acclaimed series.
It remains to be seen if that will actually happen, but based on how strongly the premiere of Season 2 was received, I have a feeling we're in for another highly rated season of post-apocalyptic TV. Note that unlike Season 1, which dropped all at once, Season 2's new episodes are releasing weekly on Wednesdays.
Also note that the news of Fallout's record-setting performance comes soon after Bethesda's Todd Howard confirmed that the events of the show will have an impact on Fallout 5. "Fallout 5 will be existing in a world where the stories and events of the show happened or are happening," he said.
Speaking of the Fallout video games, they're all available to play through Xbox Game Pass on Xbox and/or PC if you've never checked them out before. Fallout 1 and 2 are PC-only, but Fallout Tactics, 3, New Vegas, 4, and 76 are all on Xbox consoles, too.
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