This past week, a Rolling Stone report accused Steve Blackman of “fostering a toxic workplace” on the set of The Umbrella Academy, a series which is about to air its final season on Netflix. Now, one of his future projects, including the hugely ambitious live-action adaptation of Sony’s video game, Horizon Zero Dawn, appears to be dead.

In the piece by Cheyenne Roundtree, published last week, Blackman is accused of firing a woman because he was annoyed she was pregnant and didn’t tell him when hired. Among other issues, he was cited as allegedly making sexist, homophobic and transphobic comments on set, and described as “manipulative” and taking credit for others’ work. Blackman denies the allegations, calling them “entirely untrue” and “completely absurd.”

A few days later, Roundtree reported that Blackman’s two in-development series, Horizon Zero Dawn and an original show, Orbital, were now no longer moving forward. It’s not impossible Horizon could come back to life at some point, but it was already eons from release and this would set it back further, if it was already being shaped by Blackman at this point. (Update: People with knowledge of the situation say that the status of the projects, including Horizon, is not linked to the recent reporting on Blackman.)

The idea that Netflix could adapt something like Horizon Zero Dawn effectively always drew a fair amount of skepticism from those who had played the series, even in this age of great video game adaptations from Fallout to The Last of Us

The biggest problem with a series like this would be budget, where the entire concept is a sprawling, impossibly large ruined earth environment populated by exceptionally detailed, monstrous robotic animals and dinosaurs which the hero, Aloy, fights with technologically advanced arrows, spears and traps.

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It’s hard to know how this series could have been done without either A) spending an ungodly amount of money, as each episode would be like half a Transformers movie or B) creating sub-par effects or dramatically reducing the robots. Or they could spend all the money and it still may not have looked good, as we have seen with so many CG-heavy projects as of late.

This is not a problem that has plagued other video game adaptations to the same extent. Fallout has its CG creatures here and there but an almost entirely human cast with practical effects for the ghouls. The Last of Us is the same, all humans with practical effects for many of its plant-zombies. Nothing like hundred foot tall robo-T-Rexes or mammoths. But yes, those shows also use a good amount of VFX for their worlds, and are not cheap at all, mind you.

The only video game adaptation I can think to compare Horizon to in scope would be Amazon’s promised, upcoming God of War adaptation which would be similarly expensive with its mythological beasts and wild fight scenes with Kratos. But Amazon has more money than god and has shown they can already do this once with Fallout. I don’t know if we’ll see Horizon again in the future.

Update: A spokesperson for Steven Blackman had the following to say about the status of the projects and Blackman’s current work, and again saying the project being canceled was not a result of this story and his overall deal remains in place with Netflix.

'Steve Blackman has a long, ongoing, and close working relationship with Netflix, and signed a new multi-year deal earlier this year. He continues to work on new projects as well as the launch of the fourth season of the Umbrella Academy. It is preposterous and irresponsible to even suggest that there could be any impact of false and absurd allegations against Steve on the status of these projects, in a year with historic writers' and actors' strikes and dozens and dozens of project cancellations.'

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.