Amazon trashes first draft of its God Of War TV show

Lo, tell it from the highest mountains, and whisper it in the valleys and the fields: Death, ebon specter, has come on night-draped wings to usher away its charge, i.e., the most recent version of Amazon’s TV adaptation of best-selling video game series God Of War. Raging with all the vigor and fire of the gods of old—or at least, all the vigor and fire of TV executives unhappy with the creative direction of a very expensive project, often considered their nearest modern equivalent—the streamer has not only pitched multiple already-written scripts into the cauldron of burning Erebus, never to be seen again, but has also, uh, politely parted ways with showrunner Rafe Judkins and executive producers Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus on the project.

Ahem.

So, yeah: Things do not appear to be going well for the God Of War show, which was first hinted at back in 2022, betwixt the two installments of the gaming franchise’s critically beloved, massively well-selling modern installments, God Of War (2018) and God Of War: Ragnarok. (Also, right at the start of the “We’re turning video games into TV shows for grown-ups” craze.) Writing on the show, from Judkins and Iron Man writing team Ostby and Fergus, began earlier in 2024, with multiple scripts completed. But, per Variety, all that work has now been tossed out, as Amazon and Sony, who co-produced on the series, apparently weren’t happy with the creative direction the show was taking.

For the uninitiated, God Of War follows the story of Kratos, a Spartan soldier who gets so angry that he eventually both becomes a god, and kills a shit-ton of them, in a series of well-remembered-if-goofy PlayStation action games from the 2000s-era. The modern series shocked basically everybody when it showed up in 2018 by taking a character who was pretty much defined by being the mascot for a nu-metal album back in his original incarnation, and turning him into a figure of genuine pathos, mostly by focusing on his accumulated grief from years of warfare, and his damaged relationship with his son, Atreus.

Unlike, say, Amazon’s Fallout show—which had a ton of video game continuity, potential starting points, and characters to choose from—the God Of War story isn’t actually all that complicated. (It’s much closer to, say, The Last Of Us, which has done well with a fairly straight adaptation over on HBO.) Amazon and Sony are intending to restart the project, so it’ll be interesting to see if the new version is a radical departure from the games, or whether it’s hewing closer to the original story, suggesting Judkins, Ostby, and Fergus were trying to go further afield. For his part, Judkins still has an overall deal at Amazon; he’s currently the showrunner on the streamer’s Wheel Of Time show, which has been renewed for an upcoming third season.