The Last of Us HBO Locks Down a Third Season Ahead of Second's Airing

You don't get to rush this

With the second season of HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us set to start streaming from this Sunday, 13th April, anticipation is high among the PlayStation faithful. While reviews for the impending season are generally positive, they aren’t as raved about as was the case with the first. Still, some executives must have been impressed somewhere, as a third season of the post-apocalyptic drama series has been formally announced.

On X, developer Naughty Dog confirmed the news, which isn’t surprising if you’ve followed the production. As season 2 will enter The Last of Us 2 narrative territory, HBO adaptation director Craig Mazin previously mused that its significantly larger story will take longer to tell. In June 2024, Mazin mused that the tale of The Last of Us 2 could take as long as three seasons to describe appropriately, concluding that “four seems like a good number”. HBO executive Francesca Orsi reiterated that figure earlier this year, stating that “it’s looking like four seasons”.

Naughty Dog studio head honcho, writer, and HBO showrunner Neil Druckmann recently turned heads when he implied that there might not be a third game in The Last of Us series, which had the unexpected consequence of making this scribe realise how badly he wanted one.

In February 2024, Druckmann teased that a narrative concept for a third game had come to him, which he felt was worth pursuing. The first entry in the series was about “the unconditional love a parent feels for their children”, and the second dealt with “the pursuit of justice at any cost, justice for the ones you love”. Druckmann revealed that this third concept had excited him as much as the prior two, and while he didn’t have a story then, that it “is its own thing”, and would serve as a “throughline for all three. So it does feel like there’s probably one more chapter to this story”.