The Last of Us season two is coming our way in 2025 and, to our chagrin, it will have fewer episodes than season one. There will be seven episodes; however, showrunners and directors Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann also gave us some good news in the mix. First, one of the episodes will be rather long, which means we will still get plenty of story. Second, The Last of Us’ potential third season will be “significantly larger” with a wider scope. There’s so much potential storytelling that a possible season four of The Last of Us could be a reality. We love to hear that.
Here’s what Mazin told Deadline about The Last of Us season two’s episode count:
“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. 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.”
And, here are his thoughts about future seasons of The Last of Us:
“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. 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.”
But don’t worry, potential The Last of Us seasons 3 and 4 won’t go beyond the scope of the current games into totally new material. Mazin shares, “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. 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.”
We are looking forward to continuing Ellie and Joel’s apocalypse story.