The Last Of Us Writer Expecting "Furor" Over Season 2
"We don't operate to either make people happy on social media or avoid making them upset."
The writer and showrunner of HBO's The Last of Us TV series has said he expects fans to revolt over what happens in Season 2. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Craig Mazin said of Season 2, "Will there be furor? Yeah, probably. I mean, there usually is, starting even with casting."
This is nothing new. Mazin said people had a lot of negative things to say about Bella Ramsey being cast as Ellie in The Last of Us, as an example. "We knew they were the exact right person to cast and they had to go through quite a few months of people being awful on social media until they saw what we saw," he said.
For Season 2 of The Last of Us, Mazin said there will be plot points that "shock people." And similar to Season 1, there will be storylines in the show that were not in the game.
"I'm never gonna say there are things that are gonna happen in the show that happened in the game. You never know what we're gonna do," Mazin said. "But I will say that it is the adventure, the journey is the point. There are things that will shock people, things that were in the game, things that were not in the game, and that's okay. As long as they're purposeful, they're not there to just simply shock. We are not interested in creating social media fear. We just want to tell the story the way we think it should be told."
Season 2 is expected to adapt at least some of the events of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us: Part II, and that means the character Abby might show up. There is also a major character death in the sequel, which seems like it could show up in the second season of the show. As Mazin is alluding to, fans of the game series were very vocal about the events of the sequel. The developers and voice actors who worked on the game received death threats over The Last of Us: Part II.
Regarding fan feedback in general, Mazin said he is only trying to do what is right for the story, even if people don't like it.
"We don't operate to either make people happy on social media or avoid making them upset. We just do what we think is right, and we hope that people come along for the ride and enjoy it," he said.
Production on Season 2 of The Last of Us is expected to take longer than expected given the ongoing writers' strike and the impending actors' strike. Season 2 was planned for release in 2025 prior to the start of the writers' strike, and there is no telling how lengthy the delay could be.
As for Mazin, he was at one point attached as a writer on Lionsgate's Borderlands movie, but he is no long involved with the project. Naughty Dog's game series, meanwhile, is pushing ahead with a new single-player game, while the planned Last of Us multiplayer project is getting scaled back.
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