The plan is for The Last of Us to “be around for a while”

HBO’s adaptation of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us video game series premiered earlier this year and immediately became a huge hit. The first season adapted the first game in the series. HBO renewed the show pretty much right after it started airing, so we’ll also get to see the events of The Last of Us Part II on the small screen.

Showrunner Craig Mazin has said that Part II will take more than one season to adapt, which makes sense given how much more eventful it is that Part I. He reiterated that while speaking on a panel attended by Deadline. Noting that there’s “quite a bit of story to tell,” Mazin said that, “Our plan is to do it not just for one more season. We should be around for a while.”

We’ve mostly assumed that this means that The Last of Us has two more seasons in it. That should take them to the end of Part II. It’s possible the show could stick around even longer than that, especially if Naughty Dog gets cracking on a Part III. But that’ll be another day.

The Last of Us showrunner helped voice the clicker zombies

Most of the panel was devoted to breaking down the look and feel of the show. The first season of The Last of Us had over 3,000 special effects shots, but VFX supervisor Alex Wang said the crew’s goal was to use VFX to enhance the practical stuff, rather than replace it. “The first question that we all ask is not what visual effects can do, but rather, what can we get in the frame and do practically?” he said. “The conversation starts there. What that means is a really tight collaboration among visual effects and the art department, prosthetics, stunts and visual effects.”

Then there’s the sound. As it did in many instances, The Last of Us tried to tie things back to the original video games, with voice actors Misty Lee and Phillip Kovats — who voiced the dangerous clicker zombies in the games — returning to do the same thing for the show. “They basically gave us a kit of all kinds of different sound that we could pull from,” said supervising sound editor Michael J. Benavente. The clicker noises were made by combining a variety of voices, including that of Mazin himself!

Benavente also said they were careful not to record sounds that made the zombies sound too much like monsters. “We went a little monster-y at the beginning and then we pulled back. These are humans who are infected and diseased,” he said.

The Last of Us season 1 is available to stream now on HBO Max. As for season 2, it’s still in the scripting stage and could start filming as early as this year. We’ll hold out hope that it could premiere in 2024…but I wouldn’t be shocked if it got pushed into 2025.

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