The second season of "The Last of Us" is still a long way from release with a 2025 launch date, Fans are eager to see how the showrunners will decide to adapt the story-rich sequel of the game series, and it looks like it cannot be congested into just two seasons.

The Last of Us Part 2 Divided Into More Seasons

HBO and Naughty Dog are down to the last game to adapt, but anyone who has played The Last of Us Part 2 knows that there's so much material there that it would be enough for two seasons. The showrunners, however, believe it can be stretched out even more. 

The initial plan was to make the adaptation for the game sequel a two-part season, but Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann's statements imply that we will be getting more. While that serves as good news for most, there are downsides to this arrangement.

"The story material that we got from Part II of the game is way more than the story material that was in the first game, so part of what we had to do from the start was figure out how to tell that story across seasons," Mazin stated.

Their solution was to look for "natural breakpoints," and as the showrunners laid it out, they found that the second season's breakpoint would be at seven episodes, as mentioned in Gizmodo. The first season was comprised of nine episodes.

On the bright side, we will see more content in the long run. "We don't think that we're going to be able to tell the story even within two seasons because we're taking our time and go down interesting pathways which we did a little bit in season one too," Mazin continued.

He added that as long as people keep watching and they keep making more television, the third season would be significantly larger. If things go better than expected, Mazin even said that the game sequel adaptation could be extended up to a fourth season.

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Having More Content to Explore

The Last of Us was a pretty straightforward story as it mostly focused on the travels of Joel and Ellie as the former "delivers" the latter. There's not much to extend there, so much so that HBO managed to squeeze in other scenarios like specialists examining the fungi and Ellie's mom being introduced.

The sequel, however, has branched out to multiple characters as well as several periods in time. It is no longer focused on just Ellie, Joel, and the Fireflies. Instead, there's the deuteragonist Abby Anderson along with the group she's part of, the Washington Liberation Front.

Since Abby would be finding a companion in her travels, Lev, the showrunners would also have to explore or at least acknowledge the existence of the Serpahites or Scars, which is a cultist group with extreme beliefs and more extreme practices.

With that said, there are a lot of stories that can be fleshed out, meaning that cramming them all in just two seasons really won't be enough. Hopefully, we see more into the different groups as it will add more depth to the stories of the main characters in the series. 

Related: The Last of Us Developer Naughty Dog Plans to Create New Single-Player Games