The Last of Us Season 2, just like the game it's based on, was not very kind to its viewers. Early on it stabbed us in the heart with the murder of main co-protagonist Joel (Pedro Pascal), an event that might have been even more emotionally devastating this time around with a beloved star like Pedro Pascal embodying the role.
While no duo can ever compare to Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the 19-year-old is thankfully not alone after her father figure's brutal murder. In much of The Last of Us Season 2, Ellie is joined by Dina (Isabela Merced) in her journey to Seattle to hunt down the woman, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who ripped Joel away from her.
But of course, Abby has a story of her own. The Last of Us Season 2 actually began with her perspective: She's the daughter of a Firefly doctor who worked on creating a cure for the Cordyceps pandemic. But in the Season 1 finale, Abby's father — and everyone in the Salt Lake City hospital where he worked — was brutally murdered by Joel after he learned that creating a cure would've required killing Ellie. To put it simply, Abby avenged her father's death by killing Joel, and now Ellie's on the same path of vengeance.
HBO renewed The Last of Us for a third season ahead of the Season 2 premiere in April 2025. Season 2 adapts part of the video game The Last of Us Part II, and we're expecting Season 3 to continue to draw primarily from the source material.
Here's everything we know so far about The Last of Us Season 3, from when we're expecting the HBO drama to return to what it will be about.
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The Last of Us Season 3 latest news
Co-showrunner Neil Druckmann, who also directed the games the show is based on, will no longer be involved with the series, effective immediately. In a post on Instagram, Druckmann framed his exit from the series as a return to his day job running Naughty Dog, the game studio that developed both The Last of Us video games, where he'll be overseeing production on a new franchise-starting video game called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Halley Gross, a writer who worked both on Season 2 of the series and the second game, is also exiting the series.
Druckmann's explanation for his exit is certainly plausible, since Naughty Dog hasn't shipped a new game since The Last of Us Part II in 2020, and Druckmann is the studio's creative head.
When is The Last of Us Season 3 premiering?
The Last of Us Season 1 premiered in January 2023, and Season 2 premiered April 13, 2025. Following that timeline, we're expecting a roughly two-year wait before Season 3 releases. But since the second season's production was impacted by the writers strike for fair wages in 2023, we're hoping for The Last of Us to return before 2027.
What is The Last of Us Season 3 going to be about?
Based on the last shot of The Last of Us Season 2, which shows Abby inside a sports stadium on Seattle Day One, we're expecting Season 3 to follow her perspective across the three days Ellie and Dina spent in the city. The game does exactly this — making players experience the same time period from Abby's point of view after they've experienced it from Ellie's. At the virtual finale press conference, Mazin and Druckmann addressed whether Season 3 is going to unfold like Abby's portion in the game.
"All I can say is we haven't seen the last of Kaitlyn Dever and we haven't seen the last of Bella Ramsey, and we haven't seen the last of Isabela Merced, and we haven't seen the last of a lot of people who are currently dead in the story," Mazin said. Druckmann added about the characters: "Whether you will see them on screen or not, their presence will be there throughout." The pair didn't give a direct answer to how much Ellie viewers will see in Season 3.
But one thing audiences can expect in the upcoming chapter is a closer examination of the conflict between the WLF and the Seraphites. At the press conference, Mazin discussed the process of deciding how much of the two groups to include in The Last of Us Season 2. "We wanted them mostly to be experienced through the lens of people that didn't understand who they were. So, that's Ellie and Dina finding these people," Mazin said. "And we wanted to give the audience an introduction in some way to the simplicity of what's going on."
He expanded on introducing viewers to the Seraphites in Season 2. "This is a group of clearly, when we meet them, religious people who aren't fanatic, but they all have these strange scars on their faces, they all dress the same, and they are afraid of either demons or wolves. We, at that point know who the wolves are. When Ellie and Dina discover their bodies, we understand these people have been massacred, and to us, they feel like innocents."
But that perception changed quickly. "The next time [Ellie and Dina] encounter [them] it's, in fact, not the case that they're all innocents. Some people who are part of this group hang and disembowel the WLF soldiers," Mazin said. "And that's when we all realize we don't know who the good guy is — possibly no good guy. And inside of that, we begin some small understanding that the WLF came up from the people and from federal soldiers defecting, but what we don't understand yet is who the Seraphites really are. We don't understand who they are and what they want, but we're going to." Given that Abby is a member of the WLF and if Season 3 largely follows her perspective, we're bound to learn more about the Seraphites' history and goals.
ALSO READ: The Last of Us Season 2 review: HBO's hit drama makes a more provocative return
The Last of Us Season 2 finale
The Last of Us Season 2 ended in the middle of a fight between Ellie and Abby. They're inside the Seattle theater moments after Abby had just fatally shot Jesse, and Ellie stares in despair as the woman she's vowed to avenge, and has spent days tracking down, points a gun at her. That's not to mention Tommy (Gabriel Luna) being incapacitated on the floor. In the final moments of this scene, everything goes black as we hear a gunshot.
At the virtual finale press conference, Druckmann shared whether other end points were considered for Season 2. "The answer is always yes, because we just entertain everything, but nothing is coming to mind, because whatever we entertained didn't stick for very long," Druckmann said. "This always felt like the natural end point for the season."
Mazin discussed how Jesse's death will impact Ellie and Dina going forward. "Jesse dies in part because of Ellie. But Ellie doesn't pull the trigger, Abby does," Mazin said. Abby had tracked down Ellie to the theater after discovering that two of her friends — Mel (Ariela Barer) and Owen (Spencer Lord) — had been murdered. How Dina perceives the events that led to Jesse's death will be pivotal to her character. "Now the question is, who does she blame?" Mazin said. "And I'm a big believer that once you start asking, who do I blame, you're already down the wrong path."
The Last of Us Season 3 cast
Below is who we're expecting to return for The Last of Us Season 3 — these are characters who are very much alive in the series. But given that Mazin said "we haven't seen the last of a lot of people who are currently dead in the story," viewers should also anticipate characters who met their end in Season 2 to appear again.
- Bella Ramsey as Ellie
- Isabela Merced as Dina
- Kaitlyn Dever as Abby
- Gabriel Luna as Tommy
- Rutina Wesley as Maria
- Jeffrey Wright as Isaac
How many more seasons of The Last of Us will there be?
In an interview with Collider on May 19, Mazin addressed the number of episodes to expect in The Last of Us Season 3. "I think there's a decent chance that Season 3 will be longer than Season 2," he said. "The thing about Joel's death is that it's so impactful. It's such a narrative nuclear bomb that it's hard to wander away from it. We can't really take a break and move off to the side and do a Bill and Frank story."
He added that it's very unlikely for the series to conclude in just one more installment. "There's no way to complete this narrative in a third season," Mazin said. "Hopefully, we'll earn our keep enough to come back and finish it in a fourth. That's the most likely outcome." The Last of Us hasn't been renewed for a fourth season, but if HBO honors the wishes of the show creators that may change soon.
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How to watch The Last of Us
The Last of Us Seasons 1 and 2 are available to stream on Max.
