Summary
Mass Effectfans, rejoice. Prime Video is finally moving forward with production on a television adaptation of the popular gaming franchise, and they officially have a showrunner to lead the charge.
When BioWare’s originalMass Effectgame released for Xbox back in 2007, even the most ardent RPG fan wouldn’t have predicted it spurring a franchise that has spanned novels, comic books, film, and more. The beloved original trilogy of video games tells the tale ofCommander Shepard, a human who brings together a coalition of allies—alien, human, and machine—to take down the Reapers: a collection of massive, sentient spaceships who reside in a permanent hibernation before returning every fifty thousand years to harvest all advanced organic life in the Milky Way galaxy.Mass Effect 2,in particular,is regarded as a modern classicand is generally heralded as one of the greatest video games ever made. The fleshed-out setting that series creator Casey Hudson, art director Derek Watts, and the rest of theMass Effectteam created houses a beloved, believable universe of races and worlds that stands up with the very best the sci-fi genre has to offer. Now, Amazon is putting their television adaptation into full production.
Deadlineis reporting that, after multiple years of nearly no traction at all, theMass Effectseries at Amazon is getting a showrunner: Doug Jung. Jung is an industry veteran with an impressive resume that includes work onBig Love,Mindhunter, andStar Trek Beyond. Though he has executive producer experience and has written multiple scripts over the past two decades, his first shot at being a showrunner is extremely recent. Apple TV+’s upcomingChief of War—starring Jason Momoa and Temuera Morrison—won’t release until August of this year, but early reports of Jung’s performance on the show must be positive if Amazon is hiring him forMass Effect.
Amazon’sMass EffectSeries Is Finally Gaining Traction By Hiring A Showrunner
A live-actionMass Effectadaptationhas been in some sort of development since nearly the very beginning of the franchise. Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. acquired the film rights to the series back in 2010 and tried to get a movie off the ground with the support of BioWare veterans and creatives. Casey Hudson himself was assisting on the project, and various screenwriters were hired to bring the sci-fi series to the big screen. Production quickly stalled when they couldn’t figure out how to condense the series' wide-ranging worldbuilding and massive scope into a movie-length script.
A dense RPG likeMass Effectalways lends itself to a television series more than a film, so fans were excited when it was announced in 2021 that Amazon was looking into bringing an adaptation to Prime Video. It would be another three years until the series was in active development and another six months until Jung was hired. Clearly, slow and steady is the tack Amazon is taking withMass Effect. Here’s hoping they crack the code and put something together that theMass Effectfandom will get truly excited about.
