HBO has confirmed ‘The Last of Us‘ will return for Season 3 in 2027, while network boss Casey Bloys has also given the strongest indication yet that the upcoming season is now being planned as the show’s last.
Speaking to Deadline following the Emmys, Bloys was asked when viewers can expect the third season of ‘The Last of Us’. His answer was fairly straightforward:
“It’ll be happening in ’27. I don’t have a date.”
That at least gives us a year, although we’re apparently going to have to wait a little longer before HBO narrows things down any further.
More interestingly, Bloys was then pushed on whether HBO was finally ready to confirm that Season 3 would also be the final outing for the acclaimed drama. He stopped just short of making that an official announcement, but his response certainly points in that direction.
“I think [showrunner] Craig [Mazin] has planned it as the final season.”
So, not quite “HBO confirms final season”, but it is a pretty significant comment from the person running the network, and it marks something of a shift from where things stood previously.
Following Season 2, Craig Mazin had suggested there was simply too much of the remaining story from The Last of Us Part II to wrap things up in a single additional season, saying at the time that “there’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season.” The expectation then was that HBO could potentially need a fourth season to finish adapting the game.
However, if Mazin has now found a way to complete the story in Season 3, ending there makes quite a lot of sense.
Season 2 adapted roughly the first half of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II, largely following Ellie’s journey through Seattle. The upcoming third season switches the focus to Abby’s side of those events and is expected to tackle the remaining story from the second game. That brings the TV adaptation to the same point where the video game series currently ends.
And right now, there is no The Last of Us Part III waiting for HBO to adapt.
Naughty Dog has never officially announced a third game. Series creator Neil Druckmann did reveal in 2024 that he had finally come up with a concept for another instalment after struggling for years to find the right idea. He said the concept had a “throughline for all three” games and that it felt like there was “probably one more chapter to this story.” However, that was a concept rather than confirmation that a game had entered production.
Druckmann has actually become more cautious about Part III since then. In 2025, while discussing Naughty Dog’s plans, he said his assumption was that there would be no more The Last of Us games unless everything fell into place creatively. So whilst another game is certainly possible, it remains very much unannounced.
There is also the small matter of Naughty Dog being rather busy.
The studio is currently deep into development on its brand-new sci-fi universe, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, which Druckmann is writing and directing. Naughty Dog officially revealed the game in 2024, confirming it had already been in development since 2020. Druckmann stepped away from his day-to-day creative involvement with the HBO series before Season 3 specifically so he could focus more fully on Naughty Dog and Intergalactic.
Sony and Naughty Dog still haven’t announced a release date for Intergalactic, although industry reports have repeatedly pointed towards 2027 as the target, with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier previously reporting that the game would not arrive before then. More recent reports have also suggested 2027 remains the intended window, but that is still unofficial.
All of which means that even if Naughty Dog does ultimately decide to make The Last of Us Part III, there is currently no finished third chapter for HBO to move on to once it reaches the end of Part II, nor any indication that one is imminent.
Mazin has previously been very clear that he has no intention of inventing his own continuation simply to keep the TV series running, saying: “I am not going to go past the game.”
That makes Season 3 a logical place to stop. It allows Mazin to complete the adaptation of the story Naughty Dog has actually released, rather than either stretching things out or finding himself in a Game of Thrones-style situation where the television series overtakes its source material.
Of course, Bloys’ wording leaves a little room for things to change before the season arrives. But with Season 3 expected to bring the adaptation to the end of The Last of Us Part II, and a third game still only a possibility somewhere in Naughty Dog’s future, wrapping up the HBO series there would seem like a very natural conclusion.
‘The Last of Us’ Season 3 premieres in 2027 on HBO.
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