Some Very Bad News About ‘The Last Of Us’ Season 3’s Release Date

The Last of Us may have just landed two dozen Emmy nominations, but they were among the most controversial of the show. Pedro Pascal as a “lead actor” this season? Bella Ramsey with a horrible script to work with? Nominations for everyone except the actor who carried season 2, Isabela Merced? Frustrating.

But even more frustrating is going to be everything about season 3, from its presentation (a season devoid of almost the entire current cast) to its release date timeline.

HBO head Casey Bloys recently spoke about The Last of Us season 3, and it’s bad news. Here he is, speaking to Variety:

“The series is definitely planned for 2027,” Bloys said. “Craig [Mazin] is still working it out whether it will be two more seasons or one more long season,” he continued. “It hasn’t been decided yet, and I’m following Craig’s lead on that.”

So, 2027 could be two years, if we’re doing April 2025 to April 2027, or close to three years, if it’s late 2027. The gap between seasons 1 and 2 was around two and a half years. So once again, we’re waiting an interminably long time.

Craig Mazin, now doing the rest of the show solo after the departure of Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, has said previously that he’s definitely going to need four seasons to finish the story. Maybe he’s reconsidering that, but if he’s doing a much longer season, that would likely push things back even further. Are we talking 3+ years here? And last we heard, no actors involved really knew details of the script. If Mazin is still figuring things out rather than having this set in stone before or during season 2 aired, that’s not good. I have some theories about how Druckmann’s departure plays into all this, but I won’t get into speculation here…

If there really are two more seasons, this is going to be insane. It will take 2.5 years to get to a season starring Abby, a character audience have met for ten minutes, and the vast majority of the current cast won’t be there 90% of the time. Then, no doubt, we’d have to wait another 2-3 years to return to that cast and finish the story. This is just a disastrous timeline and structuring of the series. It’s true that the original game split the narrative between Ellie and Abby like this, but in the game, you could end Ellie’s storyline and pick up Abby’s seconds later. Here, it’s a 2.5 year wait.

I do not have high hopes for the rest of this show, mainly with Mazin flying solo when he was responsible for some of season 2’s worst decisions. Somehow all of this worked in season 1, but season 2 went off the rails, and the plan for this upcoming season 3 and/or 4 sounds like a nightmare.

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