The Last of Us Season 3: Latest News, How It Will Adapt the Game, and More

It's not too hard to figure why a fresh take on the zombie genre like The Last of Us was a hit for HBO coming off the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of being a good story told well — better than it was told in the source material, arguably — the series was also weirdly cathartic after a couple years of quarantines and vaccines in the real world. 

As befits a blockbuster series like this one, HBO renewed The Last of Us for a third season ahead of the Season 2 premiere in April 2025. Season 2 adapted part of the video game The Last of Us Part II, and we're expecting Season 3 to continue to cover the rest of it, which would bring us to the end of the video game version of the story. Does that mean Season 3 will be the end of The Last of Us? 

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.

ALSO READ: How The Last of Us filmed Episode 4's subway action, Ellie's song, and that big Season 2 death scene

The Last of Us Season 3 latest news

Our first new casting announcements for Season 3 are in. Clea DuVall (Veep) will be joining the cast as a member of the villainous Scars, and Jorge Lendeborg Jr. (Bumblebee) will be replacing Danny Ramirez as Manny, per Deadline. Ramirez exited the series due to a scheduling conflict, which tracks since he's expected to appear in the next couple Avengers movies.

When is The Last of Us Season 3 premiering?

The Last of Us Season 3 doesn't yet have a premiere date, but it's slated to start production in spring 2026. That makes it likely that Season 3 will premiere in early 2027.

Is Season 3 the final season of The Last of Us?

We don't know for sure, but it seems like a good bet that The Last of Us will end with Season 3. The main reason for that is simply that the series is running out of story to adapt. There are only two of these games, and Season 2 took us about midway through the second one. If Season 3 takes us to the end of that game, then it would make for a natural ending spot. 

In an interview with Collider way back in May 2025, however, Mazin indicated he's planning for more. "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." 

But is January 2026, HBO head Casey Bloys told a different story. Bloys, when asked by Deadline whether Season 3 would be the end of it, said, "It certainly seems that way, but on decisions like that, we will defer to the showrunners." One way to interpret this comment is that Season 3 could work as a satisfying ending, but there's room for more if they can make it come up with more story. Considering the game The Last of Us: Part 2 has a pretty open-ended conclusion itself, this was always going to be a dilemma they'd eventually have to face once the show became such a huge hit.

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 HBO's press conference at the conclusion of the season, 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," Mazin said. "Some people who are part of this group hang and disembowel the WLF soldiers. 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

[Spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2 follow. Read at your own risk!]

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 and crew

Co-showrunner Neil Druckmann, who also directed the games the show is based on, is much less involved with Season 3 than he was with the first two seasons. 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.

While it may be easy to assume Druckmann's exit was the result of a conflict between him and co-showrunner Craig Mazin, since that's often how these things go, there haven't been any evidence or reports about such a thing, and Druckmann's explanation for his exit does make sense. Naughty Dog hasn't shipped a new game since The Last of Us Part II in 2020, and Druckmann, the studio's creative head, has spent a whole lot of the intervening time working on this TV show.

Meanwhile, casting for Season 3 is underway, and we're expecting all the key players who made it out of Season 2 alive to return. 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.

Catherine O'Hara would have been among those key players returning for Season 3, according to Mazin, but the legendary actress sadly passed away on Jan. 30.

"She's so good. But she was stolen from all of us. The thing that's upsetting me is I don't get to see her in other stuff. Like, I don't care about my show. I wanted to see her in other things, because what else was gonna happen?" Mazin said on his podcast on Feb. 3.

The Last of Us Season 3 cast:

• Bella Ramsey as Ellie
• Isabela Merced as Dina
• Kaitlyn Dever as Abby
• Gabriel Luna as Tommy
• Rutina Wesley as Maria
• Jeffrey Wright as Isaac
• Jorge Lendeborg Jr as Manny
• Clea DuVall

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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.