With an award-winning first season done and dusted, plans for The Last of Us Season 2 and beyond are in full swing, even with the strike action ongoing.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, showrunner Craig Mazin discussed the show’s reception, budgets, favorite episodes, and more, but naturally the juiciest stuff comes from talk about adapting The Last of Part II for seasons 2 and 3 of the show.
Mazin was asked plenty about that subject, and he wasn’t entirely forthcoming about it, but there’s still lots to glean from the interview. For instance, when asked if rumors they’d already cast the character of Abby, Mazin laughs and apparently goes red whilst saying ”Maybe”. Pressed further he explained.
”The strike stopped us in our tracks. Things were in process. Look, Abby was the first role that we wanted to tackle. We’ve got a pretty good track record of making major cast announcements and people going “really?” which will probably continue. So people may disagree, but I think we got it right so far and the audience seems to feel we got it right and the Academy seems to feel we got it right.”
Asked if he is either dreading or excited by the potential response to putting the events of The Last of Us Part II’s notorious opening, Mazin tried his best to skirt around it whilst pointing out they’d changed the order of things from the first game in season one.
The Last of Us Showrunner Season 2 Plans
”Neither, and I dispute the premise. I’m very studiously avoiding confirming anything even through a passive acceptance of a question. Anybody that has played the game and then watched the first season knows that sometimes we do exactly what happened to the game and sometimes we do something wildly different. We also don’t necessarily do things in the same order, or at the same time. In our first season, we repeatedly did things that were upsetting — everyone died except Joel and Ellie. People understood watching the show that this was a story where people aren’t safe.”
Mazin goes on to say any backlash can be turned around, as evidenced by the first season, ”As for backlash, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between emotion because they care and backlash. But neither I nor Neil make things with that in mind. There are also times during the season where we think they’re probably gonna be annoyed with us, but later they’ll get it.”
The interview also sees Mazin confirm the budget will be bigger, The Last of Us Part II story will definitely not be just contained to a single season (but not necessarily two either), and answers that familiar (for game fans) question about Joel’s actions at the end of season one.
There’s no set time frame for The Last of Us Season 2, especially with the strikes ongoing, but it at least sounds like we may have casting news on the near horizon.
