When season two of HBO's award-winning drama adaptation based on the critically acclaimed video game finally releases in 2025, it will be shorter than the first season at seven episodes.
But the good news is that a possible third season will be "significantly bigger" and possibly have a greater scope, and there could very well be a fourth season following it according to series co-creators, executive producers, showrunners and directors Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann. Additionally, one of the season two episodes will be "pretty big."
The size of the order for season two was announced in January when the line-up of the season's seven directors was revealed, including Mazin and Druckmann. The duo arrived at the number of episodes after careful consideration.
“The story material that we got from Part II of the game is way more than the story material that was in the first game, so part of what we had to do from the start was figure out how to tell that story across seasons,” Mazin said. “When you do that, you look for natural breakpoints, and as we laid it out, this season, the national breakpoint felt like it came after seven episodes.”
That means Mazin and Druckmann envision the series lasting at least three seasons, and perhaps as long as four. So far, The Last of Us has been picked up for season two by HBO, so further seasons will depend on viewership, something the duo is aware of.
“We don’t think that we’re going to be able to tell the story even within two seasons [2 and 3] because we’re taking our time and go down interesting pathways which we did a little bit in Season 1 too,” Mazin said. “We feel like it’s almost assuredly going to be the case that — as long as people keep watching and we can keep making more television — Season 3 will be significantly larger. And indeed, the story may require Season 4.”
Later in the interview, Mazin sounded even more definitive. “One thing is absolutely for sure, I don’t see how we could tell the story that remains after Season 2 is complete in one more season,” he said.
In the interview conducted earlier this year, Mazin and Druckmann attempted to allay fans' concerns that they planned to tell the entire story from Part II of the game in the seven episodes of season two.
“We just want to put people’s minds at ease that the idea that this season coming up is a little bit shorter than the first one is not because we’re taking less time to tell the stories, it’s because we want to take more time,” Mazin said. “The story that we’re telling is much bigger than the story of Season 1, there’s just a lot more going on, it’s a lot harder to produce but we want every episode to feel like its own blockbuster to be honest with you.”
The first season of the post-apocalyptic drama followed Joel (Pedro Pascal) and teenage girl Ellie (Bella Ramsey), whom he hired to smuggle out of a quarantine zone. The two embark on a brutal, heartbreaking journey across the US and must rely on each other for survival.
Mazin and Druckmann stick to the themes of the two existing parts of the PlayStation game, which are described as unconditional love (part I) and revenge (part II).
“More specifically, it’s a continuation of love from the first season, and this is just the dark side of that coin, the pursuit of justice at any cost for the ones you love and the exploration of that,” Druckmann said of Season 2.
One thing Mazin and Druckmann won't do is go beyond the existing source material, as fellow HBO genre drama Game of Thrones went further after covering the published five novels in George R.R.'s series. Martin; Martin still has to complete the planned sixth and seventh books.
There has already been speculation about a third The Last of Us game, but a new part has not yet been picked up or put into development.
“As a fan, I’m thrilled that there might be a third Last of Us game. As the co-creator of this television show, there’s no world where I would want our show to go beyond the source material that people have in the world,” Mazin said. “Our show as people know it on HBO is going to cover the material from the second game and then quite a bit of material that is relevant to that story but, as I said, wanders down interesting new paths, unseen stories that were told within the context of that games material.”
Comments (0)