The Last of Us Season 3 Confirms a Major Change (And Fans Will Be Excited)

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In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Craig Mazin talked about being the lone writer for the upcoming season, and what fans can expect from the upcoming season, and whether or not he hopes to direct more than just the season premiere for the next season of The Last of Us. While this will mark the first time Mazin has written on The Last of Us by himself, he doesn’t seem all too concerned with tackling the beloved series on his own. When asked where he’s at with the writing process currently, Mazin revealed that while he has written some, there’s still plenty of writing to be done yet.

“This is kind of my favorite time. It’s very quiet. It’s just sitting here with my wonderful ergonomic keyboard and clacking away. The pages are happening, and I get to be a monk for a while, which I love, and I just write. It’s the purest form of what I do,” he explained to the outlet. “And then in just a couple of months or so, that happy time will start to be less quiet because we begin a very long prep period while I’m still writing, and then we begin to shoot while I’m still writing. In seasons one and two, I finished writing about six weeks before we started shooting the last episode.”

Although he’s alone this time around, Mazin did note that he learned a ton from Neil over the first two seasons, that he feels like that has helped him while writing for Season 3. In fact, Mazin noted that, while he did work with Neil on the other seasons, Neil was also still very much busy running Naughty Dog, leaving him alone on set in Canada for most of the production. So, Mazin feels as if the process isn’t too different this time around. “When we made season two, we really were thinking about what comes after because you can’t really tell half of that story without thinking about what the whole story should be. So we really did get that work in.”

The Last of Us is based on the hit video game franchise of the same name from Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy. The series is set twenty years after a fungal pandemic destroyed civilization. The show follows the hardened survivor Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, as he smuggles Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey, a young girl immune to the infection, across a post-apocalyptic United States to the Fireflies. The first season of the hit HBO Max series premiered to rave reviews from critics, securing an impressive 96% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The series quickly earned a renewal for Season 2, which saw a slight dip in its Rotten Tomatoes score with a 91%, and served as the introduction to Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby.

The upcoming third season will see Dever’s Abby take on the leading role and has been at the center of concern in recent months for all of the behind-the-scenes changes. As it stands, the series isn’t expected to return until sometime in 2027. This is because it’s reported that they’re still trying to decide whether or not to stretch the series out into four seasons in order to properly tell the story they set out to tell. The third season will take on the game’s approach to switching the narrative from Ellie’s to Abby’s and they want to ensure they can tell Abby’s journey without rushing it as the series will rewind the clock in order to show certain events from her character’s point of view.

As of now, it’s unclear when Season 3 of The Last of Us will go into production. However, fans can currently watch both seasons now exclusively on HBO Max.