The Last of Us season 2 confirms spring 2025 release on HBO

The first season of The Last of Us, based on Naughty Dog's video game series, came out on HBO in 2023 and became a big hit. The show stayed faithful to the beloved source material. the performances from Pedro Pascal (as Joel) and Bella Ramsey (as Ellie) were top-notch, the fungal zombies were horrifying and the drama crackling. What more could you ask for?

Another season, obviously. Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have been hard at work adapting the video game The Last of Us Part II for TV, which will take Ellie and Joel's adventure in a whole new wild direction. Unlike the first season, which adapted the whole of the first Last of Us video game, the events of The Last of Us Part II will be spread over multiple seasons of TV. The second season will clock in at seven episodes, which is less than we'd like, but we'll assume they know what they're doing.

Anyway, we're getting more information on when exactly we'll be able to see those new episodes. Warner Bros. Discovery executive JB Perrette recently talked to reporters, including at Deadline, and shared that The Last of Us season 2 is on track for a spring 2025 release.

Perrette talked a lot about tentpole releases on HBO going forward, which means they want to structure each year around big event shows. In 2025, that will include the third season of The White Lotus in February, the second season of The Last of Us in the spring, and the new Game of Thrones prequel show A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms sometime after that.

“As we look even beyond that we’ll see the third season of Euphoria probably in early 2026, then we get back into House of the Dragon Season 3, so we’re now in a cadence of having at least 2 or 3 of our major tentpoles every year,” Perrette continued. Beyond that, HBO has that new Harry Potter TV show in development.

It makes sense to try and give fans big splashy TV shows they'll love, but I hope HBO doesn't become so preoccupied with delivering tentpole content that the quality suffers. You can kind of already see this happening. The Penguin was a big smash for HBO this year, but Dune: Prophecy isn't making many waves, and the second season of House of the Dragon ended on a cliffhanger rather than a climax, apparently because of production issues.

So I hope HBO is careful going forward. We want exciting TV, but not at the price of quality. For The Last of Us in particular, I'm not worried.

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