The Last Of Us season 2 could run through 4 seasons with a shorter season 2 and a "much larger" season 3. No padding or filler expected.

[John Elden Ring]

Source

When Season 2 finally arrives in 2025, it will be shorter than Season 1, consisting of seven episodes. But the good news is that a potential third season will be “significantly larger” and possibly bigger in scope, and there could very well be a Season 4 coming behind it according to series co-creators, executive producers, showrunners and directors Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann. Plus, one of the Season 2 episodes will be “quite big” in length.

“We don’t think that we’re going to be able to tell the story even within two seasons [2 and 3] because we’re taking our time and go down interesting pathways which we did a little bit in Season 1 too,” Mazin said. “We feel like it’s almost assuredly going to be the case that — as long as people keep watching and we can keep making more television — Season 3 will be significantly larger. And indeed, the story may require Season 4.”


Later in the interview, Mazin sounded even more definitive.


“One thing is absolutely for sure, I don’t see how we could tell the story that remains after Season 2 is complete in one more season,” he said.

“We just want to put people’s minds at ease that the idea that this season coming up is a little bit shorter than the first one is not because we’re taking less time to tell the stories, it’s because we want to take more time,” Mazin said. “The story that we’re telling is much bigger than the story of Season 1, there’s just a lot more going on, it’s a lot harder to produce but we want every episode to feel like its own blockbuster to be honest with you.”

“Our process was, we sketched out multiple seasons, then we did a deep dive on Season 2,” he said. “To echo what Craig is saying, there is no padding, everything that is in there is intentional. There is always a goal in mind that we’re heading towards, we are never meandering the sake of meandering, it’s always to say something greater for these characters and the themes.”

“And certainly in Season 2, there’s an episode that is going to be again closer to — I don’t know if I would say feature length but quite big,” he added. “I like generally hitting about an hour, it’s a great length, I love working in that format. What we don’t want to do is, say a season of seven episodes where each episode is 90 minutes; part of why we’re doing seven episodes is finding that nice line.”