“Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is? Insanity is doing the exact same thing, over and over again, expecting it to change.” Said (albeit in far more vulgar terms) by Far Cry 3’s menacing and memorable antagonist Vaas Montenegro, it’s also a narrative ethos that the first-person shooter franchise has lived by since its inception. Each game follows a different storyline, with the biggest commonality being the main character’s immersion into an anarchic locale that forces them to survive in the wilderness, often in opposition to hostile military forces.
While the first game was a well-made FPS with a generic story centered on a retired U.S. Special Forces soldier, the narrative became a much greater focus as the series continued. The anthology format has allowed the series to explore the cyclical and seductive qualities of bloodshed, the consequences of colonization and imperialism, and the dangers of contemporary religious extremism in semi-fictionalized locations everywhere from Thailand to Montana. The games have been ripe for a Hollywood adaptation from the very beginning, and after several failed attempts, there’s now a television series on the way... and its stars have just been revealed.
On June 25, Variety reported that FX’s upcoming Far Cry series would star Lizzy Caplan and Rob McElhenney. The show, which was announced in November 2025, was created by McElhenney and Noah Hawley, creator and lead writer of Alien: Earth and the loose X-Men TV series Legion.
While the show will be based on the games, calling it an adaptation would be disingenuous. It’s already confirmed that the show won’t be directly adapting any game, with Hawley explaining his decision to Deadline by saying “when you play a video game, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cutscenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline.” While that’s odd logic, the end result is still the best possible outcome for this particular series.
Although Far Cry has had scene-chewing villains and chaotic tales of survival for over 20 years, Hawley perfectly summed up the games’ unifying themes in the same interview: “Each season is a different story about civilized people thrown into situations where they have to become increasingly uncivilized.”
An anthology series focusing on original stories from the creator of another pretty successful anthology series (FX’s Fargo) is the perfect way to honor the games’ storytelling versatility without disappointing the expectations fans would naturally have regarding live-action depictions of Vaas or Far Cry 5’s fundamentalist cult leader. While the show has no release date or official plot synopsis yet, if Hawley and McElhenney play their cards right, they could have a success in the vein of Amazon’s Fallout TV series — an original story that plays with the source material’s sandbox in a way that delights dedicated fans.
Far Cry does not yet have a release date.
