HBO is currently well into production on the second season of its acclaimed adaptation of Naughty Dog’s “The Last of Us” and now co-creators and showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have now spelled out just how big the series could get. As we know the first season adapted the original 2013 “The Last of Us” video game across nine episodes. Some elements got expanded on, others were skipped or altered, but they covered many of the key story beats and finished right where that first game finished.
2020’s “The Last of Us Part II” video game however is a much more substantial beast in terms of content and narrative, one which is more than twice as long as its predecessor. The producers already made it clear they intend to split it across multiple seasons. Recently came the reveal that the second season, which will wrap filming in August, will run for a shorter seven episodes.
Mazin explains to that they came to that number due to a natural break in the story. Combined with them going down some new tangents not in the game, such as they did with the first season’s celebrated third episode “Long, Long Time,” the result is a show that could go beyond the previously planned three seasons: “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,.
