The Last of Us season 2 trailer is beautifully bleak

HBO has released a teaser trailer for the second season of The Last of Us.

The show that proved just how good game-to-TV adaptations can be is heading our way for a second round, and judging by the trailer the quality level isn’t dropping in The Last of Us season 2.

Its teaser alone manages to fit a story arc into just two minutes. We have the idyll of Joel and Ellie appearing to be safe, only for their world to come tumbling down all over again.

We’re not in the spoiler business at ShortList, but plenty of you will know roughly what happens in The Last of Us season 2. It’s based on the game The Last of Us Part II, which is even bleaker than the first.

We expect this second season to follow the game’s narrative fairly closely, as the first did, but the series’s creative director Neil Druckmann says we can expect even more juicy backstory bits in the show.

“There’s stuff in this season that I’m really excited about — stuff that we hinted at — one scene in particular comes to mind that I think fans of the game will eat up,” Druckmann said on the Strictly Business podcast.

“Because it really kind of tells you a lot of backstory of this important character that there wasn’t really a way for us to even do that in the game.”

How mysterious.

Shortly after the first season of The Last of Us was broadcast, Sky announced it was the second-biggest launch of a show on Sky Atlantic to date, behind Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon.

The Hollywood Reporter even claimed the show may have outpaced that show in the US, with an average 30.4 million viewers per episode.

Each episode of the first season reportedly cost around $10 million to produce. It’s a pricey series, but not on the level of the $20 million-an-ep House of the Dragon season 2.

The Last of Us season 2 is due on screens in 2025, but no release date has been revealed yet. It will be at least a two-year gap between seasons. The first came out in January 2023, and the second will have seven episodes.

And after that? The Last of Us season 2 will not actually tell the whole of the second game’s story.

“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,” director Craig Mazin told Deadline.

“You look for natural breakpoints, and as we laid it out, this season, the natural breakpoint felt like it came after seven episodes.”

We have the story sauce for season 3 already, then. But will the show outpace the game? Developer Naughty Dog has confirmed The Last of Us Part III is on the cards. When? There’s no clue. And given how long games take to develop these days, there’s a wait ahead.

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