I Love These Life Is Strange Casting Choices, But This Show Is A Mistake

Amazon has cast its leads for the upcoming Life Is Strange television series in development at MGM Studios.

As reported by Variety earlier this week, Amazon’s Life Is Strange will star Tatum Grace Hopkins and Maisy Stella as Max and Chloe, respectively.

Additionally, a poster has been revealed by Amazon MGM Studios featuring polaroid photos of both actors, alongside their characters.

The series will mark Hopkins’ television debut, having previously worked in Broadway theatre productions such as The Queen of Versailles and For the Girls, as well as the short film "Meek" from 2024.

Stella, on the other hand, has starred in films like My Old Ass and Poetic License, as well as the television series Nashville. She’s also a musician, performing as part of the duo Lennon & Maisy with her older sister and releasing music as a solo artist.

On the whole, I think these casting choices are great. Tatum Grace Hopkins’ performance in "Meek" (which can be watched in its entirety on YouTube) is a good fit for Max Caulfield, while Maisy Stella in My Old Ass is a dead ringer for Chloe, sans the blue hair.

Perhaps it’s just me though, but for as much as I like the casting, why do I still feel so hollow about this series?

Life Is Strange Needs To Move On From Max And Chloe

It’s no secret that video games have struggled for a long time with being adapted into other mediums.

For a good 20 or 30 years, basically any video game that got a live-action adaptation was destined for a lower score on Rotten Tomatoes. In fact, to this day, only two movies have managed to break over 70%.

Taking interactive gameplay that’s stretched across a 10-20 hour story and condensing it down into a few hours with no interactive elements probably spoils the experience, I guess.

It’s why I don’t really like HBO’s The Last of Us that much, where despite a huge budget and “prestige” approach to the source material, it just didn’t really manage to capture Joel and Ellie’s relationship growth for me due to the quicker pacing to fit into nine episodes, along with the lack of interactivity.

Amazon kind of figured it out with the first season of Fallout, arguably the most successful live-action video game adaptation to date, focusing on a brand new story within the world of the games rather than adapting something familiar.

The show felt fresh for long-time fans and approachable for newcomers, which gave it a sort-of universal appeal. My partner, who doesn’t really play that many video games, found herself hooked on Fallout, which is a testament to how well it managed to break the curse.

Considering Amazon figured that out here, I’m puzzled as to why it’s doing what seems to be a straightforward adaptation of the first Life Is Strange game.

Yeah, you could argue that Max and Chloe are the most iconic part of this franchise, to the point where fans seem to be unhappy with anything that doesn’t include both of them.

But before Square Enix basically made the Life Is Strange series the “Max and Chloe Adventures”, this series was originally built from the ground-up as an anthology, and the TV series should instead be embracing that.

If the premise of a Life Is Strange story is simply “coming of age drama where the main character has some kind of superpower”, there are so many interesting places to take that outside of the first game’s identity.

I’ll be cautiously watching Amazon’s Life Is Strange in the same way I’ll be cautiously playing Life Is Strange: Reunion later this month. I’ve been a fan since 2015, so how could I not.

All the best to Tatum Grace Hopkins and Maisy Stella, who I'm sure are going to be fantastic in their roles. But my hope is that the franchise will one day find the confidence to break free of its commitment to retelling the same story over and over again.