Neil Druckmann Has One Condition To Make The Last Of Us Part 3
This article contains light spoilers for both "The Last of Us" and "The Last of Us Part II." If you're unfamiliar with the larger arc of the video games, turn around and come back later! Spoilers ahead!
Even if you've never played the Naughty Dog games "The Last of Us" and "The Last of Us Part II," released in 2013 and 2020, you're probably familiar with them — especially considering that they're the source material for one of HBO's biggest and most popular shows at the moment. So will Neil Druckmann, who created and directed the game alongside Bruce Straley, ever make the game into a trilogy?
During an appearance on the Sacred Symbols podcast (which focuses on all things Playstation, the console that serves as the exclusive home of "The Last of Us"), Druckmann addressed the possibility of a third video game, despite the fact that he's currently fully committed to the HBO series "The Last of Us." (Druckmann serves as a co-showrunner alongside Craig Mazin, who previously worked with the premium network on "Chernobyl," and Druckmann has directed two episodes to date, including the latest installment "The Price.")
"I feel like, with the best TV makers at HBO, we're making the best version of that," Druckmann said of the story he, Naughty Dog, and now Mazin have been telling for over a decade at this point. "So, if we were ever to come back to it, I want to make sure it's a story worthy of 'The Last of Us.' I love that world, I love these characters. With the right opportunity, with the right idea — yeah, I would totally jump at it."
This feels ... pretty non-committal, which seems about right. For anyone familiar with the combined, larger story of "The Last of Us" and "The Last of Us Part II," it does provide a satisfying conclusion, and Druckmann is correct that the material would have to be really, really good to run it back again.
The Last of Us has moved on to material from the second game — and the story seems like a closed loop
If you're familiar with the first season of HBO's "The Last of Us," you know what happens in the first game. After Joel Miller, played by Pedro Pascal onscreen, watches his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) die in his arms at the outset of the cordyceps outbreak, he closes himself off to the post-apocalyptic world he now inhabits ... until he meets Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a girl who, by all accounts, is immune to the cordyceps virus. When Joel meets up with the rebel Firefly group, they ask him to safely transport Ellie to Salt Lake City for a "procedure," but throughout the journey, Joel and Ellie bond to the point where she basically becomes his surrogate daughter; when it's time to perform the procedure on an unconscious Ellie, Joel steals her from the operating room and guns down every Firefly in his path, including unarmed doctors and nurses.
The second season of "The Last of Us," which is about to air its finale, picks up five years afterwards, only for viewers to discover that there's a noticeable divide between the once-close Joel and Ellie. This is, in large part, because we know that Joel lied to Ellie about what happened at the Firefly hospital in Utah, and in the season's penultimate episode "The Price," we also learn that Ellie watches Joel lie to a grieving widow about her husband — whom he killed after the man became infected by the virus — and connects the dots about what actually happened back in Salt Lake City.
After Joel dies early in both "The Last of Us Part II" and the second season of "The Last of Us" — at the hands of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), whose father was the surgeon trying to perform the procedure on Ellie — Ellie goes on her own vengeance quest, which we see play out in full in "The Last of Us Part II." Without totally spoiling the end of the video game (because we're going to watch it play out on the small screen as the series continues), we do get some closure as far as Ellie is concerned, so hopefully, Druckmann will think carefully about continuing her story unless he has a truly phenomenal reason.
The season 2 finale of "The Last of Us" airs on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, May 25, and you can stream both seasons on HBO Max now.