The first season of The Last of Us aired on HBO in 2023, and it was a smash hit. We'd all seen zombie stories before, but this one hit different. People thrilled to the adventures of Joel and Ellie, a surrogate father-daughter team who worked their way across a post-apocalyptic America. Hype for the second season, which premieres in just a couple of weeks, couldn't be higher.
The first season of The Last of Us was based on the video game of the same name, from Naughty Dog. The second season will start adapting The Last of Us Part II, but won't finish; the second game has a more ambitious story than the first and will take multiple seasons of TV to adapt. We don't know how many exactly, but it sounds like showrunners Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin could spread the story of The Last of Us Part II over as many as three seasons of TV.
But what happens after that? Without giving away any spoilers, The Last of Us Part II ends on an ambiguous note. Even Druckmann, who's the head creative officer behind the video games as well as producing the TV show, has admitted that "[i]t does feel like there's probably one more chapter to this story." Rumors of a third Last of Us game have been flying pretty much since the second one came out in 2020, but nothing's been confirmed.
That leads to an interesting question: if Druckmann and Mazin finish telling the story of The Last of Us Part II on TV, however long it takes to do that, and The Last of Us Part III still doesn't exist as a video game, what happens to the show? Do they just end the series with the end of The Last of Us Part II...or do they continue, and give us that "one more chapter" Druckmann has talked about, even though the source material doesn't exist yet?
The Last of Us creator on whether he'd continue the story beyond the games
IGN recently asked Druckmann this question, and he responded with what I'll call a series of long non-answers. "I have to have an ending," Druckmann said. "When I made The Last of Us 1, I didn't know if there was going to be a sequel, so that had to be a definitive ending. When I worked on Uncharted 4, I don't know if we'll ever get to do it again. I need it to be a definitive ending. Last of Us 2, same way. All these things have to line up.
"I don't know how long I'll keep doing this or whether I'll be given another opportunity. So I leave nothing on the line. Right now it's like, we have an ending in mind. And that ending will be it. That ending will be it for this story."
One solution for this would just be to create The Last of Us Part III video game. Then the show would have source material. But Druckmann is noncommittal on that front. At the moment, Naughty Dog is working on a new game called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, which I'm sure is taking up Druckmann's time when he's not working on The Last of Us TV show. “As far as everything else, and you’re asking me about future games, my time so much is, we have to finish this season,” he said. “We’re not quite done. We’re almost there. Knock on wood we get to do it again. Season 3, there’s a lot more story we have to cover, as you know with game two."
It sounds like Druckmann's plan is to adapt The Last of Us Part II to TV in a way that feels final. But he's right that the story doesn't feel finished at the end of The Last of Us Part II. If The Last of Us TV show continues to be popular — and given the success of the first season, I expect it to be; I think Druckmann is being way too modest when he knocks on wood — I can definitely see a world where people want the story to continue, with or without a game.
The cautionary tale of Game of Thrones
But that can be dangerous. We have an example of a show that ran out of source material and then kept going to diminishing returns: Game of Thrones. That show had five of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books to work with, but Martin has yet to write an ending, so it had to forge forward without a detailed blueprint. Although the final seasons have their virtues, they were definitely seen by the fandom as a step down in quality.
If Druckmann and co continue the story of The Last of Us in TV form without a game to base it on, are they doomed to the same fate? Maybe, but personally I think it would be worth the risk. Also, while Game of Thrones was produced by people who knew Martin's work but didn't originate it, Neil Druckmann is the creator of The Last of Us franchise, and he's one of the showrunners on the TV series. He crafted the story of the first two games to great fanfare. If he puts as much energy into a hypothetical continuation of the story on TV, I don't see why it couldn't turn out just as good.
Weirdly, Game of Thrones and The Last of Us have more than a few things in common. They're both big budget HBO shows, and the two leads — Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey — each broke out on Game of Thrones, where they played Oberyn Martell and Lyanna Mormont respectively. Maybe The Last of Us is fated to parallel the show in other ways.
But we don't really have to think seriously about this stuff for a while. For now, The Last of Us season 2 premieres on HBO and Max on Sunday, April 13.
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