HBO’s The Last of Us is about to wrap up its second season, and a third is on the way. Showrunner Craig Mazin has now said it would be impossible to tell the story he and his team have in mind in anything fewer than four seasons, adding that he expects Season 3 will be longer than Season 2.
Mazin told Collider, “There’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season. Hopefully, we’ll earn our keep enough to come back and finish it in a fourth.” Before this, HBO management said The Last of Us would likely end after its fourth season.
The showrunner and writer also assured viewers that the team is always thinking ahead to help map out the future of the show, and so far, Mazin has things mapped out through Season 4.
“We thought ahead to Season 3 and Season 4, to try to get as much visibility as we can, so that we don’t end up in a situation where we’re sitting down and getting into details for a season and then going, ‘Oh, man, if only we hadn’t had that person say that one line or be in that spot or wear that jacket, this would be so much cooler,'” Mazin said.
Mazin also said that viewers should expect Season 2 to end in a dramatic fashion, with a cliffhanger ending. He said it was always the plan for Season 1 to cover the events of the first game and it was always the case that The Last of Us: Part II would need to be told over multiple seasons, which leads to new challenges–and opportunities.
“Now [with Season 2], we’re actually in more of a traditional cliffhangery mode, where you’re telling a story, and then you end the season with something that says, ‘Whoa, this is going to change a whole bunch of things, and we’ll see you when we get back and pick it up from there.’ We ask ourselves a lot of questions and we think about what we ought to do when we think about what the narrative that exists affords us and that we should do,” Mazin said.
It remains to be seen where Season 2 will end the story, but Mazin is hopeful that fans are satisfied. “Hopefully, we set them up to want to return when we come back for the next run,” he said.
Mazin also said he believes there is a “decent chance” that Season 3 is longer than Season 2, “just because the manner of that narrative and the opportunities it affords us are a little different.”
For context, Season 1 had nine episodes, while Season 2 has seven. The Season 2 finale airs this Sunday, May 25.
He said the major character death in Season 2 was “such a narrative nuclear bomb” that the writers couldn’t divert too far from it any any point. In Season 1, the “Long, Long Time” episode diverted from the main story and had a side story about Bill and Frank, but a diversion like this wasn’t possible for Season 2. Something like it, however, may be possible with Season 3.
“I think we’ll have a little more room there,” Mazin said of Season 3.
Season 3 of The Last of Us is likely still a long time off, as the new season hasn’t started filming yet. Fans of the show are used to long waits, as Season 1 wrapped up in March 2023, and it wasn’t until April 2025 that Season 2 debuted. That’s about two years, so if that schedule holds, viewers may not get The Last of Us Season 3 until 2027, but this is just guesswork.
As for the game series, Naughty Dog has not announced any new The Last of Us games following the cancellation of The Last of Us Online in December 2023. The studio is now making a new IP called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, a game that’s mysterious even to the people in it.
