The Last of Us confirms shorter season 2 as episodes revealed
Fans shouldn't worry the story is being condensed – in fact, it seems as though it's quite the opposite...
We're still many months away from seeing the second season of The Last of Us, which isn't expected to arrive until 2025 and which will adapt the second instalment in the video game series.
However, we continue to get drip-fed information about what we can expect, and we now know exactly how many episodes will feature in the run – and it's less than season 1.
While season 1 was made up of nine episodes, season 2 will be made up of seven. However, fans shouldn't worry that this means showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann will be compressing the second game's story – in fact, it's completely the opposite.
Mazin told Deadline: "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, and as we laid it out, this season, the national breakpoint felt like it came after seven episodes. 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.
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"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 continued: "We just want to put people’s minds at ease that the idea that this season coming up is a little bit shorter than the first one is not because we’re taking less time to tell the stories, it’s because we want to take more time.
"The story that we’re telling is much bigger than the story of Season 1, there’s just a lot more going on, it’s a lot harder to produce but we want every episode to feel like its own blockbuster, to be honest with you."
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Mazin also confirmed that there was an upcoming episode which will be "quite big" in length, although perhaps not quite "feature length", and that the show would not be going beyond the story told in the games.
Rumours of a third game have been rumbling on of late, and while Mazin didn't rule out adapting a potential third outing, he made it clear they would only do so after it had, theoretically, been released.
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He said: "As a fan, I’m thrilled that there might be a third Last of Us game. As the co-creator of this television show, there’s no world where I would want our show to go beyond the source material that people have in the world."
Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey will be returning to star in The Last of Us season 2, with a host of new actors joining them as key characters from the second game.
The Last of Us is available on Sky and NOW. Get one month free Sky Stream, Sky TV and Netflix.
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