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The Last of Us Season 2: Craig Mazin Confirms February 2024 Start Date

It looks like we have a Season 2 production start date for Neil Druckmann & Craig Mazin's Pedro Pascal & Bella Ramsey-starring The Last of Us.

Earlier this week, we learned that some of those "Lost Levels" in the upcoming remastered version of 2020's The Last of Us Part II could find their way into the second season of Neil Druckmann & Craig Mazin's Pedro Pascal (Joel) & Bella Ramsey (Bella)-starring The Last of Us. Now, we're learning when production on that second season will get underway – with Mazin confirming during Variety's "A Night in the Writers' Room" panel that production will begin on February 12, 2024. Earlier reports were that the production was looking to start as soon as the SAG-AFTRA strike ended, so it seems like things are in order. Moderated by Variety's senior TV features editor Emily Longeretta, the panel also included Charlotte Stoudt of The Morning Show; Nathan Fielder of The Curse; Sonja Warfield of The Gilded Age; Fred Golan of Silo; Deborah Cahn of The Diplomat; and Michael Dinner of Justified: City Primeval.

The Last of Us: Craig Mazin of Season 2 & Beyond

In an interview with Variety from earlier in the summer, Mazin discussed how a 2025 debut for the second season was still workable (but less & less so the longer the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes continue), confirmed that Season 3 will happen (as long as the viewers keep watching), and addressed the possibility of familiar faces returning in flashbacks (and why they have no plans to mess with that "beautiful" episode).

"The Last of Us" Could Still Make Its 2025 Delivery Date – For Now: "We had a little more flexibility, I think, than normally just because we had to wait a little bit longer any way to line up production with the weather. A lot of what we do is outside, and so we had a schedule that weirdly hasn't been immediately impacted. But we're getting pretty close; we can't keep our original start dates forever, obviously. If these strikes go much longer, we inevitably will have to push, and that hurts us, and it hurts the audience, and it hurts HBO. We all, everybody wants to get back to work; I think everybody that's actually doing the work, including the network people who are with us on the ground, I think everybody just wants to get this solved. So fingers crossed."

"The Last of Us" Season 3 Will Happen As Long As Viewers Keep Watching: "It's going to be more than one season. There's more story, so this show will not end with Season 2 unless people don't watch it, and we'll get canceled. Barring that, we will be doing some things exactly the way they were in the game. We're going to do other things that are in the game, and we're gonna do some things that are in the game, but we're gonna do them differently in our own method. No matter if you have played the game or not. You will be surprised as the season unfolds. We have some interesting twists and turns."

Could Melanie Lynskey, Storm Reid & Others Return via Flashbacks? "There's always a chance for everything. With us, you never know, and we obviously don't confine ourselves by timelines. People who are dead sometimes reappear, and sometimes we meet people that we didn't even know, and then we find out that they are somebody."

Mazin on Why There Won't Be Another Bill (Nick Offerman) & Frank (Murray Bartlett) Episode: "What you won't see is, for instance, another very special episode with Bill and Frank; we aren't going to milk it. When we do something that we think is beautiful, we let it be as it is and find other beautiful things to do."

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