The highly awaited second season of The Last of Us will begin production in early 2024, announced HBO boss Casey Bloys at a press conference Thursday morning.
With the strikes from both WGA and SAG-AFTRA this year, delays to many shows and movies came to the forefront of the strikes including that of The Last of Us.
The Last of Us was not on the network’s 2024 slate presentation, which means the show could land in 2025 at the earliest.
The first season became a phenom when it premiered on HBO in January 2023. Based on the popular PlayStation video game of the same name, the show follows a smuggler named Joel (played by Pedro Pascal in the show) in a post-apocalyptic America years after the world has been crippled by a deadly fungus. Joel is tasked with bringing a young girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across the country in order to create a cure for the cordyceps fungus. Along the way, they encounter fellow survivors, cutthroat bandits, and monstrous clickers — people who have become so infected by the disease that fungi sprouts from their bodies.
Even before the season 1 finale, the show was renewed for a season 2. The video game also spawned a sequel, The Last of Us: Part II. The creator Neil Durckmann and showrunner Craig Mazin have plans to take that second video game and adapt it.
“We’ve outlined all of Season 2 and we’re ready to go as soon as the strike ends, We were able to map out all of Season 2,” added Mazin. “And I also wrote and submitted the script for the first episode and sent it in [to HBO] around 10:30 or 10:40 p.m. right before the midnight the [WGA] strike began. I think it’s becoming essentially a near certainty that we won’t be able to start [filming] when we were hoping to start, which is upsetting. We are all raring to go.”
