House of the Dragon and The Last of Us have a lot in common: they’re both mega-popular, mega-expensive HBO series that are based on existing properties. Another similarity is reduced episode counts in their sophomore seasons: House of the Dragon went from 10 episodes to 8, while The Last of Us season 2 will be even shorter, at only seven episodes long.
Creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann explained why in an interview with Deadline. “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 said. “When you do that, you look for natural breakpoints, and as we laid it out, this season, the national breakpoint felt like it came after seven episodes.”
He continued:
“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. 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.”
Mazin also hinted that season 2 will have a “quite big” episode. Maybe not feature length, but long enough to listen to a Linda Ronstadt song a few extra times. “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,” he said.
The Last of Us season 2 returns to HBO and Max in 2025.