The Last of Us HBO Season 2 Will Have 7 Episodes, Season 3 Will be “Significantly Larger”

It’s going to be a while before we get to feast our eyes on the second season of HBO’s The Last of Us, but with production now underway, new details are beginning to filter through nonetheless. After HBO recently offered a first glimpse at what Joel and Ellie will look like in the upcoming season with two new images, co-series co creators and showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have offered further tidbits on the future of the show in an interview with Deadline.

For instance, Mazin has confirmed that the show’s season season is going to be seven episodes long, as opposed to the first season’s nine episodes.

“The story material that we got from Part 2 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,” Mazin said. “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.”

That said, one of the season’s seven episodes is going to be longer in length. Similar to the first season’s 80-minute premiere, Mazin says the second season is going to have an episode that’s going to be not quite feature-length, but still longer than the usual hour of runtime.

And what about beyond season 2? It’s been confirmed in the past that The Last of Us Part 2 is going to be split across multiple seasons, so we’ve known for a while that the second season won’t be the end of the show. Mazin touched upon what will follow afterwards as well, saying that the third season will be “significantly larger”, and that even after a season 3 has wrapped up, the show will still likely not be done.

“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,” he said. “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.”

Mazin had another season 4 tease to offer, adding, “One thing is absolutely for sure, I don’t see how we could tell the story that remains after Season 2 is complete in one more season.”

The Last of Us Season 2 is set to premiere sometime in 2025. In addition to Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey as Joel and Ellie respectively, it will also star Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, Isabela Merced as Dina, Young Mazino as Jesse, and Jeffrey Wright as Isaac, among others.